Researchers fear being scooped by AI, as OpenAI's announcement timing draws questions

Summary

As AI agents’ ability to do science autonomously continues to improve, scientists are facing a once-unthinkable question: will I get scooped by a bot? At least twice in the past five weeks, researchers have said that they had been working for an extended period on a particular research question, only to learn that artificial-intelligence companies had either answered the question before them or announced results before they were ready to do the same. In response, researchers who are worried that AI tools might scrape their unpublished work and scoop them are limiting their use of such tools. Anthropic’s AI biolab finds ‘CRISPR-like’ DNA in viruses. What’s next? Nevertheless, some AI researchers, although not all, say that AI agents are increasingly likely to reach conclusions before scientists can do so. Researchers are “going to be scooped, but not because they’ve uploaded a manuscript”, says Geoffrey Irving, chief scientist at Resolution, an AI-safety research organization in Berkeley, California. “They’re going to get scooped because the AIs are very good at solving problems, and they’re going to get better and better.” Controversial findings On 7 September, Tristan Buckmaster, a mathematician at New York University in New York City, posted online that he and a collaborator had made progress on the Navier–Stokes problem, a long-standing open question in fluid dynamics. According to Buckmaster’s account, he and Levent Alpöge, a mathematician at the AI company Anthropic, based in San Francisco, California, whose work with Buckmaster was a personal project, had been pursuing the problem for a year. Buckmaster’s 7 September post also included a paper with the solution to a simpler version of the problem. The next day, 8 September, OpenAI, also in San Francisco, announced that its agents had solved the puzzle — a timing that Buckmaster has publicly questioned. Who gets credit in the AI era? OpenAI maths bombshell sparks debate Buckmaster raised the possibility that information that he and Alpöge had uploaded to an OpenAI tool could have been used to train the company’s models. OpenAI disputed this scenario. The company said in a statement that an investigation had confirmed that Buckmaster’s “prompts” in the two months before the 8 September announcement “could not have influenced the system in any way, including through training”. The statement also said tha…