New Fields Medal Winner Joins OpenAI Same Day

Jacob Ziegler, awarded the 2026 Fields Medal for proving the Andre-Oort conjecture, stated on the day of the ceremony (July 23, Philadelphia) that he would soon join OpenAI to work on AI safety. He believes AI will transform the mathematical profession: according to his prediction, within two years models will be able to prove theorems better than humans. Previously, Ziegler published a classification of scenarios in which AI could lead to human extinction, and also claimed that AI has already doubled his productivity. His former student Levent Alpöge, now working at Anthropic, used the Claude Fable 5 model to refute the Jacobi conjecture, marking the first demonstration of an LLM's ability to solve a long-standing open problem outside its field. Ziegler is also the only Fields Medalist working at a Canadian university and has a unique record: a two-time gold medalist at the IMO (with one perfect score), the youngest professor in the history of the University of Toronto's mathematics department.