OpenAI says its $10 million Navier-Stokes proof could cost $100,000 next year

The company expects the price of AI-driven frontier math to fall sharply, even as mathematicians question who deserves credit OpenAI says a Navier-Stokes project like the one it just ran could cost about $100,000 next year. The first attempt cost roughly $10 million. That is a drop of about 99% in a single year, if the forecast holds. What OpenAI says it did On September 8, 2026, OpenAI announced results from an internal AI system. The system reportedly outperformed GPT-6 Astra, the company’s flagship model. OpenAI says the system produced an analytical proof addressing the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. It also produced a formalization of that proof in Lean, a software tool that checks mathematical proofs step by step. The Navier-Stokes problem is one of the Millennium Prize Problems set by the Clay Mathematics Institute. It concerns the equations that describe how incompressible fluids move in three dimensions. OpenAI’s result points to breakdown. According to the company, the equations can develop finite-time singularities starting from smooth initial conditions, while the total energy stays finite. The compute bill The effort did not come from a single chatbot ...