- Anthropic’s AI model Claude Fable 5 helped disprove the Jacobian Conjecture from 1939
- Mathematician Levent Alpoge used the AI during the FIFA Club World Cup final to find a counterexample
- The AI-generated polynomial formula had a constant Jacobian but was not reversible, disproving the conjecture
Artificial intelligence has achieved one of its biggest mathematical breakthroughs yet. Anthropic's AI model, Claude Fable 5, recently helped disprove the Jacobian Conjecture, an unsolved problem in algebraic geometry that had puzzled mathematicians since 1939. The breakthrough was made by mathematician Levent Alpoge, a former Harvard researcher who now works at Anthropic.
On Sunday night, while watching the FIFA Club World Cup final, Alpoge asked Claude Fable 5 to work on the Jacobian Conjecture after a friend, Akhil, brought up the problem. Instead of supporting the conjecture, the AI produced something mathematicians had been searching for unsuccessfully for nearly 90 years - a counterexample showing the conjecture was false. Alpöge later shared the result on X, posting a 216-character mathematical formula that demonstrated the finding. The tweet has close to 30 million views.
"Hello there, the Jacobian conjecture is false. Thanks to my close friend Akhil for asking about it and my other close friend Fable for working during the World Cup final," he wrote.
Check out the tweet here:
Researchers say these advances show that AI can explore unconventional lines of reasoning that humans might overlook.
