OpenAI Proof Mismatch Shifts Automated Verification Back to Human Reviewers
A specific divergence between prose and Lean code shows why compiling a formal proof cannot replace checking that it represents the published argument.
Researchers found that the Lean version of OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes proof weakens a bound from m+4 to m+5, so it does not formalize the same argument as the natural-language paper. OpenAI acknowledged the mismatch and said it does not itself invalidate either proof, while the researchers said isolating a genuine discrepancy took about two weeks of human checking. For scholarly publishers and research communities, agent-scale output makes verification capacity and accountable review a more consequential bottleneck than paper production.