Oct 9: OpenAI Pulls Three Math Papers; Its Revenue Is $50 Billion

OpenAI withdrew three of its 722 AI-written math papers over a single sign error, and mathematicians including Terence Tao pushed back on the release. OpenAI also told investors its revenue run rate was about 50 billion dollars, 20 billion below earlier reports, and cryptographers argued over whether AI math could break crypto wallets within months. **OpenAI withdraws three AI math papers over sign error** OpenAI withdrew three Hodge conjecture papers and revised 14 others, while mathematicians including Terence Tao's Association for Human Mathematics criticized the release. OpenAI (GitHub) · Retraction Watch · The Decoder · Asaf Karagila (blog) **OpenAI run rate is 50 billion dollars, not 70 billion** OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue was about 50 billion dollars because it counts partner sales differently than Anthropic, and AI stocks fell on Thursday. CNBC · Axios · CNBC **Fired OpenAI safety researchers deny leaking** The three fired researchers deny leaking to the press, while OpenAI cites a pattern of misconduct but won't say which rules were broken. TechCrunch · TRT World **Vance accuses Microsoft over H-1B visas** JD Vance said Microsoft laid off 6,000 Americans while using 6,300 H-1B visas, and Microsoft says 80 percent of its H-1B filings were for people it already employed. Fox Business **Google Cloud launches long-running Gemini agent** Google's Gemini agent runs work tasks for hours or days, creates coworker agents with their own Workspace accounts, and can use Gemini or Claude models. Google Cloud · VentureBeat **Anthropic bans needless cruelty toward Claude** Anthropic's new usage policy, in effect November 12th, bans sustained and needless cruelty toward its models, and Claude ending the chat remains the main enforcement. Anthropic · The Verge · Hacker News **Anthropic launches free OSS Scanner for open source** Anthropic's OSS Scanner sends AI-written bug reports to maintainers of critical open-source projects with no human review. Anthropic **Trump calls anyone saying Artificial Intelligence the enemy** Trump wrote that anyone who says Artificial Intelligence instead of Super Intelligence is the enemy, and the White House changed the AI dot gov banner to SI dot gov. Trump's Truth (archive of Truth Social) · Axios **Tech CEOs receive National Medals of Science** Trump gave science and technology medals to Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, Satya Nadella and Michael Dell, and AI companies pledged about 2.4 billion dollars for federal science. The White House · NBC News · Al Jazeera **Could AI math break crypto wallets within months?** Justin Drake and Vitalik Buterin warn that AI math could weaken the cryptography behind crypto wallets, while Yehuda Lindell and others call it fear-mongering with no evidence. Cointelegraph · Gizmodo *The most important news from Silicon Valley and AI. 15 minutes, every weekday morning.* **Transcript** Good morning. It's Friday, October 9th, and this is the Valley Morning Briefing. Today: OpenAI withdrew three of its AI-written math papers over a sign error. Its revenue run rate came in 20 billion dollars below earlier reports. And cryptographers argue over whether AI math could break crypto wallets within months. Let's go. Within a day of posting 722 AI-written math papers, OpenAI withdrew three of them. All three failed because of a single sign error. We covered the release on Wednesday and Thursday. The error is in a paper on Weil classes on abelian eightfolds, where it breaks a cancellation argument. Two papers on K3 surfaces used the same construction, so they failed too. All three were related to the Hodge conjecture, one of the most famous open problems in mathematics. OpenAI revised 14 other papers as well, with repaired proofs and some corrected statements. And it added machine-checked proofs, so about 42 percent of the main results are now formally verified in Lean. Dan Roberts, an OpenAI research lead, announced the withdrawals on X. An OpenAI spokesperson told Retraction Watch that the company found the errors in its own audit. The three withdrawn papers are less than half a percent of the release. But the spokesperson also said that roughly half the results were released before they were confirmed. OpenAI says its advisory group on math and AI recommended releasing the papers without waiting for full formal proofs. Alex Townsend, a mathematician at Cornell, expects more errors. He says OpenAI should have released the Lean-verified papers first, and then asked for help checking the rest. Andrew Sutherland of MIT calls the quick withdrawal responsible. But he told Retraction Watch that "it will take a lot more than that to earn back the trust they have lost." The Association for Human Mathematics, a group chaired by Terence Tao, went further. It called the release a demonstration of power and urged mathematicians to stop working with OpenAI. The group also says OpenAI ignored its own advisory group, which had said that labs should not test advanced math problems on internal models. Tao argues in a post on Mastodon that even correct AI proofs can hurt the field. In his view, a human breakthrough brings talks, workshops and new collaborations. AI results that nobody can explain bring few of them. He also points out that once a problem is solved, it stays solved, and that knowing a solution exists can spoil the search for other approaches. So he wants mathematics to measure progress less by problems solved, and more by explanation and new research directions. The set theorist Asaf Karagila makes a related complaint about one paper, which claims to settle a century-old question in his field. He says the paper is so unclear that a journal should reject it on quality alone, whether or not the proof is right. And he says he will not spend his time decoding it. OpenAI says it will ask its advisory group whether the rules for future releases should change. The Financial Times reported, and CNBC confirmed, that OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue was about 50 billion dollars at the end of September. That is about 20 billion dollars less than the figure widely reported last month. The gap comes from accounting. On September 29th, Axios reported that OpenAI's run rate was nearing 70 billion dollars. Axios now says that figure was based on information OpenAI shared with investors who wanted to compare it directly with Anthropic, so it counted OpenAI's revenue the way Anthropic counts its own. OpenAI has not commented on the record, and the explanations come from people who asked not to be named. Both companies follow standard accounting rules, but they treat sales through cloud partners differently. The accounting professor Francine McKenna explained the difference to Axios with an example. A customer pays 100 dollars for an AI service through a cloud provider. Anthropic books the full 100 dollars as revenue and lists the cloud provider's cut as a cost. OpenAI books only its own share of certain partner sales. McKenna says the choice depends on how each company sees its role, including who controls the customer and who delivers the product. OpenAI also told investors that its run rate grew 77 percent in the third quarter alone, and that its enterprise business more than doubled in the same period. Leaked financials showed that OpenAI had about 13 billion dollars in revenue for all of 2025. For comparison, Anthropic's annualized revenue, counted its own way, was reported at about 65 billion dollars in July. The stock market reacted on Thursday. CoreWeave fell more than 7 percent, and Oracle lost about 5 percent. Nvidia fell almost 3 percent, and the Nasdaq had its biggest one-day loss since mid-August. Kristina Hooper, chief market strategist at Man Group, said on CNBC that a few more days like this could bring "a real rout in AI-related names." Reactions on X were split. Some market commentators said the 70 billion dollar figure was never OpenAI's own number, and that 50 billion is still huge growth. Others saw it as OpenAI correcting a revenue figure that was inflated by 20 billion dollars. OpenAI is under pressure to justify its valuation of 852 billion dollars. The company filed confidentially for an IPO in June and is aiming for a listing in 2027. It is also in early talks to raise about 30 billion dollars more. Axios says run rates are common in Silicon Valley, but investors in public markets prefer actual revenue. Now, the quick hits. Yesterday, we reported on the letter to OpenAI's board from the three safety researchers the company fired last week. They now deny leaking to the press. One of them, Jasmine Wang, says she was fired over access to an executive's email that OpenAI had granted her. OpenAI cites a pattern of misconduct but won't say which rules were broken. The three worry the firings could be used to end OpenAI's promise of outside auditors. JD Vance said Microsoft laid off 6,000 Americans while using 6,300 H-1B visas. Microsoft says that 80 percent of its H-1B filings last year were for people it already employed. Google Cloud has launched the Gemini agent, which runs work tasks in the cloud for hours or days. It can create coworker agents, each with its own Workspace account, email address and calendar. Tasks can run on Gemini or on Anthropic's Claude models. Microsoft, OpenAI and SpaceXAI have launched similar persistent agents in the past two months. Google's agent is in private preview, with no release date yet. Anthropic's new usage policy, which takes effect November 12th, bans sustained and needless cruelty toward its models. The company says the rule covers only extreme cases with no clear purpose, and that Claude ending the chat remains the main enforcement. It did not say whether accounts could also be banned. On Hacker News, some engineers say the rule simply keeps out pointless cruelty. On Wednesday, we reported on Anthropic's Cyber Verification Program. Now the company has launched OSS Scanner, a free bug scanner for critical open-source projects. It uses Anthropic's strongest models, including Claude Mythos, and sends reports to maintainers with no human review. Anthropic says its models recently found over 29,000 possible bugs, but its staff could check only about 6,000. In Anthropic's own test, one of 97 serious findings was a false positive. On Monday, we reported on President Trump's Super Intelligence Force. On Thursday, he wrote on Truth Social that the White House considers anyone who says "Artificial Intelligence" instead of "Super Intelligence" to be "the enemy." Later that day, the White House changed the banner on AI dot gov to read SI dot gov. Other White House pages still say artificial intelligence. A September executive order told agencies to use SI but set no penalty. On Thursday, Trump gave the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su. Satya Nadella and Michael Dell got the technology medal. At the same event, AI companies pledged about 2.4 billion dollars in computing credits and tools for federal science. Al Jazeera reports that critics see the awards as a sign of close ties between tech leaders and the White House. After OpenAI's math release, which we covered yesterday, an Ethereum researcher told the crypto industry to prepare for what he calls bunker mode. Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation wrote on X on Wednesday that ECDSA, the signature scheme that secures crypto wallets, could break before quantum computers arrive. He says it is now reasonable to prepare for that, and that in the worst case it could happen within months. By a break, he means recovering a private key in about a week on a large GPU cluster. He recommends a calm, controlled move of funds to fresh addresses, whose public keys are still hidden behind a hash. Cryptographers and crypto executives now disagree on whether AI's speed at research math makes a break of today's public-key cryptography a real risk in the near term. Drake says it does. He wrote that recent days have humbled human mathematical intuition, and that long-held assumptions have fallen. He argues that elliptic curves have rich algebraic structure, which leaves room for clever attacks. Hash functions, he says, are designed to have very little. Vitalik Buterin shares the concern. He said nobody should rush to move funds today, and that he has lost more money in botched migrations than in hacks. But he warned that lattice schemes, which are meant to resist quantum attacks, could be seriously weakened by AI math over the next two years. Matthew Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins, makes a narrower case. He says he is not predicting a break. But he says today's security levels rest on the work of a couple of dozen human researchers. If they were wrong, a scheme rated at 128 bits might really offer as few as 96. Then nobody would know which key sizes to trust. Yehuda Lindell, head of cryptography at Coinbase, calls this fear-mongering. He says there is no evidence at all of a break in decades-old assumptions like elliptic curve cryptography. He argues that AI proving theorems does not show that these problems are easy. And he says hash functions have historically been broken more often than elliptic curves. Rob Hamilton, CEO of the bitcoin custody firm AnchorWatch, says Drake did not show any specific math that is weakening ECDSA. Adam Back, the CEO of Blockstream, called the warning a fud-burger. No break of ECDSA has been publicly disclosed. Lindell summed up his view on X: "It is the very definition of FUD — it cannot be proven wrong but there's also no evidence whatsoever of it being true." That's the Valley Morning Briefing for Friday, October 9th. If you enjoy the show, the best way to help is to send it to a friend. Thanks for listening, and see you on Monday.