While the global public watches in awe as artificial intelligence models solve olympiad problems and complex equations in mere seconds, a serious crisis of trust has erupted at the pinnacle of world science. Twenty-five laureates of the Fields Medal — the highest honor in the world of mathematics, often called the "Nobel Prize" for mathematicians — have joined forces and published an open statement on the "Math and AI" platform, in which they state outright: private corporations developing AI are turning fundamental mathematics into a set of "benchmarks" — performance tests that showcase the speed and power of their models. According to the signatories, this approach deals irreparable harm to genuine science and its community, and the goals of OpenAI, Google, and other tech giants have come into direct conflict with the mission of the academic world.
Commercial benchmark versus scientific truth
The central thesis of the statement, published on September 12, 2026, is the sharp divergence of interests. The scientists emphasize that the commercial goals of private AI companies and the sacred tasks of the academic mathematical community are fundamentally different. Tech giants, they say, use complex mathematical problems purely as a marketing tool: solving an olympiad problem in seconds becomes an occasion for a press release, a boost in stock prices, and a demonstration of the "power" of their algorithms. Meanwhile, the very essence of the mathematician's philosophical and conceptual work — understanding the deep structure of a problem, constructing proofs, creating new theories — is completely ignored. The mass illusion created by such "achievements" gives the public a false and dangerous impression that machines have already surpassed human thought.
"Solving problems is not the goal, but the tool"
In the statement, the authors specifically remind us that mathematics is not a set of formulas and digital algorithms. The most valuable aspect of this discipline is not finding a ready-made answer, but conceptual understanding, the "insight" of the human mind, and the ability to construct logical structures that have no analogues in nature. In the signatories' view, artificial intelligence is capable of producing answers through combinatorics and probabilistic computations, but it does not create a new scientific philosophy and does not attain true understanding. The scientists warn: if AI developers chase only numbers and speed, forgetting the genuine human purpose, the tool they are building risks becoming a weapon aimed at thought itself.
Threat to the younger generation and a call for control
A separate section of the statement is devoted to the future of science. The scientists express concern that young researchers, who have grown up in the age of AI, will become dependent on the dry calculations performed for them by machines, instead of developing their own complex thinking and creating new theories. Academic circles call on Silicon Valley and global corporations to stop turning mathematics into an instrument of cheap publicity. The key demand of the signatories: artificial intelligence must remain an auxiliary tool, subordinate to the human mind, and not a force that replaces it. Scientific control over the processes that shape the future of thought must be preserved by the academic community.
Context: why this matters for all of humanity
The open letter of the 25 Fields Medal laureates is not merely a professional discussion among a narrow circle. It is a signal that in an era when AI is penetrating every sphere of intellectual activity, the question of who and how defines the value of knowledge has become a question of the survival of human civilization as a thinking system. If mathematics — a discipline in which the "correct answer" is formally verifiable — is already being turned into an object of a marketing race, then what will happen to the humanities, art, and philosophy, where there is no single criterion of truth? The statement, published on the "Math and AI" platform and widely covered by world media on September 12, 2026, marked the moment when the elite of world science openly declared: the power of the human mind is not measured by cold code on servers, and genuine science will not allow its essence to become a victim of commercial pressure.
