Claude Mythos reportedly solves OpenAI’s landmark Erdős problem with a “cute, simple proof”
Anthropic employees say Claude Mythos can also solve OpenAI’s “AI math milestone.” OpenAI recently disproved the Erdős unit-distance conjecture, an open problem in combinatorial geometry since 1946. Anthropic engineer Sholto Douglas wrote on X that Mythos solves it with a “cute, simple proof,” a sign of “serious overhang” in AI-driven math discoveries.
The team used a test system built after AI solved Erdős problem #1196: isolated Claude Code instances with Mythos access receive the problem, develop solution paths, and then one instance summarizes and distributes them to further instances working independently. Mythos frequently took a different route than OpenAI’s model. Mathematician Daniel Litt called the result “a bit worse” than OpenAI’s, but Mythos reportedly found OpenAI’s solution too. Anthropic published a proof version prepared by Opus 4.7.
Google DeepMind also recently announced that an AI-assisted system solved nine Erdős problems, though its approach relies on the formal proof language Lean, which is less impressive from an LLM purist’s perspective. Then again, Claude Code is an agentic harness, not a pure LLM either.
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