NEAR AI’s Lean agent solves every Putnam problem for $111, 250x cheaper than rivals

Solving every problem in one of math’s most grueling benchmarks typically costs tens of thousands of dollars. NEAR AI just did it for $111. On September 6, 2026, NEAR Protocol co-founder Alex Skidanov announced that the project’s open-source Lean agent had solved all 672 problems in the PutnamBench benchmark, a suite drawn from the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. The total bill: $111. The second-cheapest known submission cost 250 times more. What PutnamBench actually is, and why it matters The Putnam competition is the most prestigious undergraduate math contest in North America. Getting a score of zero is not unusual, even among brilliant students. The exam is designed to break you. PutnamBench, introduced in 2024, takes that tradition of difficulty and turns it into a formal evaluation suite for AI theorem-provers. The benchmark contains 672 problems encoded in Lean 4, a proof assistant language that requires mathematical arguments to be written with machine-verifiable precision. A proof that’s logically sloppy gets rejected outright, no partial credit. Before NEAR AI’s result, agents attempting PutnamBench frequently needed thousands of inference calls per proble...