As of now, the best evidence suggests that AI has materially advanced mathematical research and has at least one strong publicly documented case of resolving a long-standing open problem, but it has not been shown to have broadly “solved mathematics” or routinely cracked the field’s hardest landmark conjectures.
What the evidence is strongest on
1) Competition-level math: clearly yes
AI systems have reached or exceeded elite human performance on very hard contest problems, including IMO problems.
DeepMind reported a system reaching silver-medal level on the 2024 IMO, with formally verified solutions in Lean.[1]- DeepMind later reported a gold-medal level result on IMO 2025 with an advanced Gemini “Deep Think” system.[4]
This is important evidence of strong reasoning, but IMO problems are still posed problems, not open research questions.
2) Open research problems: there is now serious evidence of real progress
The most compelling publicly documented case is 
OpenAI’s reported disproof of the planar unit-distance conjecture in discrete geometry.[2]
Why this stands out:
- it concerns a genuine, long-standing open problem;
OpenAI released a proof document;- external mathematicians publicly commented on it, including prominent experts;
- the result was presented as a genuine mathematical construction, not just a benchmark answer.[2]
This is the clearest evidence so far that AI has done more than generate plausible-looking proofs: it appears to have produced a mathematically substantive new result.
3) AI-assisted advances beyond one headline result
There is also substantial evidence of AI helping produce or accelerate research-level results:
- OpenAI described GPT-5 assisting in work on a 40-year-old optimization problem, where the human researcher used the model to help develop the proof strategy.[3]
- OpenAI’s “early experiments in accelerating science with GPT-5” describe multiple mathematical and theoretical results where model-generated arguments were checked and incorporated by humans.[4]
- DeepMind reported semi-autonomous work on a large set of Erdős problems, with some cases turning out to be genuinely novel and others already solved in the literature, which is itself revealing about the current state of the art.[5]
These are best understood as material acceleration of research, not full replacement of mathematicians.
What the evidence does not yet show
The current evidence does not support the claim that AI has broadly solved the deepest open problems in mathematics, such as the Millennium Prize Problems. Nor does it show that AI can now routinely produce publishable, end-to-end mathematical research without substantial human oversight, problem selection, or verification.
A careful summary is:
AI has moved from “solving hard exam problems” to occasionally producing genuine new mathematics and materially assisting research, but the field is still in an early phase, and most results remain either collaboration-heavy, lower-bound improvements, or single prominent breakthroughs rather than a general solution to open mathematics.
Bottom line
If you want the most defensible current answer: yes, AI has materially advanced previously unsolved mathematics, and there is at least one highly credible, publicly documented case of an AI-generated solution to a long-standing open problem.[2] But the evidence is still selective and emerging, not proof that AI has broadly conquered unsolved mathematics.
