OpenAI vice president Kevin Weil announced in a since-deleted post that GPT-5 had solved ten unsolved Erdős problems and advanced eleven others. The claim rested on entries marked open at the website maintained by mathematician Thomas Bloom. Bloom corrected the announcement, explaining that open there meant he knew of no paper containing a solution. GPT-5 had found references to existing solutions that Bloom had missed. OpenAI researcher Sébastien Bubeck, who had promoted the result, acknowledged that the system found solutions in the literature and defended the difficulty of that search. The deletion closed the announcement, while the expert correction restored the distinction between retrieving a paper and producing a new proof.

The mistake exposed how easily a database label can become a discovery claim when corporate prestige supplies the verb. Open described the limits of the bibliography, yet the announcement treated it as a description of mathematical knowledge. Literature search can be valuable, especially across scattered publications, and finding overlooked references may save researchers work. A proof enters mathematics through arguments that specialists can inspect. A search result points toward an argument already preserved in a paper. By celebrating first, OpenAI transferred verification to mathematicians outside the company and let deletion substitute for a public correction from the executive account. The durable record consists of the explanation from Bloom, the acknowledgment from Bubeck, and the papers returned by the search.