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Public story · 2026-09-10 · high
Thom opted out of OpenAI training on June 29, was told his chats were excluded, then found one behind an Astra-solved problem.
Why now: This is circulating as of September 10, alongside the earlier Buckmaster Navier-Stokes complaint that made the same accusation.
OpenAI trained its Astra model on private research chats, according to mathematician Andreas Thom. Thom says one of those chats, where he and Gábor Kun worked on Gromov's soficity conjecture, fed a problem OpenAI credited Astra with solving. He laid out the claim in a Mastodon post shared on Hacker News, where it reached 246 points. A parallel thread on r/OpenAI reached 368 upvotes.
Thom says he opted out of model training on June 29, then asked OpenAI directly whether his conversations were used. He says OpenAI told him no, and one of the excluded chats now appears tied to the Gromov's-conjecture problem Astra is credited with solving.
Thom's complaint follows a separate dispute from Buckmaster over an unsolved Navier-Stokes problem. Different mathematician, different math, same accusation: private research chats feeding a model's public results without consent.
None of this is confirmed. Thom's account is one side of it, and OpenAI hasn't addressed his specific case publicly. Settling it needs training logs from OpenAI showing whether the opted-out conversations were excluded, and only OpenAI holds those.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
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The 48-level clear took r/OpenAI's top slot at 1,124 upvotes; a 166-upvote r/singularity post put Astra at 13% on MazeBench without tools, and a smaller thread reported over-engineering problems in Unity. The spread is the useful read: strong on tool-mediated multi-step browse...
Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge published three results on finite-time blow-up under smooth forcing for 3D incompressible Euler, Boussinesq and incompressible porous media. Terence Tao wrote that nothing in principle prevents the methods extending to Navier-Stokes. Then,...
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