OpenAI's Mathematical Breakthroughs Stoke Debate Over Future of Encryption Security

OpenAI has announced solutions to hundreds of long-standing mathematical problems, prompting widespread debate about whether advanced AI could eventually discover classical algorithms to break encryption protocols widely used in finance and blockchain. Between May and October 2026, OpenAI published 722 research manuscripts covering 372 families of mathematical problems, including solutions to landmark conjectures that have eluded mathematicians for decades. In May, the company disproved the Unit Distance Conjecture, a problem unsolved for nearly 80 years. By September, an internal model trained for just 24 days solved over 100 open problems across virtually all mathematical branches. The computational cost was modest—roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro usage per result.