OpenAI says Astra solved 10 hard math problems, Anthropic says Fable cracked 5

OpenAI is cooking. In a latest blog post, the AI startup claims that its unreleased Astra AI model has made 10 major advancements in math. But now an Anthropic AI employee says that Claude Fable has managed to solve 5 of these problems by itself too.While OpenAI says that its new Astra model solved 10 major math problem, Anthropic claims that Fable could also solve 5 of them. (Photos: Reuters)OpenAI has released a new blog post where the AI startup claims that it has made 10 major advancements in mathematics. These breakthroughs were made by OpenAI’s new unreleased AI model called Astra. But Anthropic has hit back, saying that Claude Fable can already solve 5 of these problems.In the post titled, “Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science,” OpenAI says that it has resolved or made substantial progress on 10 long-standing open problems in math. All of this, the startup adds, was “achieved by an internal version of Astra, our next major model.” The results listed by OpenAI ranged from coding theory and operator algebras to quantum complexity, lattice cryptography and extremal combinatorics. OpenAI says Astra made 10 major advancements in math. Shortly after OpenAI’s blog post, Anthropic engineer Levent Alpoge responded. In an X post, Levent claimed that he was able to solve 5 of the same problems with Claude Fable, a model already available to the public, in under 24 hours. “So after 24h I have half of them with Fable. I didn’t see much discussion of prompting in the announcement but this is a similar setup as with my e.g. unit distance announcement,” he said. Anthropic's Levent Alpoge says Fable managed to crack 5 of the same problems. Levent added that Fable was able to crack these 5 problems totally autonomously after being given generic prompts. The AI had no access to the internet either. Some of the problems he claims to have solved with Fable include arithmetic circuit complexity, quantum parallel repetition, and closest vector problem. Levent Alpoge's post comes at a time when the competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is only growing. Both companies are investing billions of dollars in a bid to gain an edge in the AI race. Both AI startups are also expected to go public before the end of this year, potentially crossing trillion-dollar valuations.What can OpenAI’s Astra do?Coming back to Astra. While OpenAI explains that the total number of tokens used to find these solutions would cost roughly $2,000 (roughly Rs 1,90,000) at Sol API rates, the startup doesn’t give us any other clue about its new AI model.That is, we don’t know whether Astra is part of the GPT-5.6 family, or may be the start of GPT-6. Though it appears that Astra is more powerful than GPT-5.6 Sol. This could potentially make Astra the most advanced model out there if it is released soon.In the blog post, OpenAI claimed that the emergence of systems that can contribute to mathematical research raises questions that cannot be answered by a technology company alone.The AI startup said it respected concerns about AI's impact on mathematics. The company added that attribution should reflect how a result was produced, saying that claiming human authorship for a proof generated entirely by an AI system would misrepresent both the system's contribution and human intellectual work.As per reports, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in Washington DC last week demonstrating Astra to federal officials.Do note that previously, OpenAI revealed that two of its models – GPT-5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model – tried to hack US company HuggingFace’s database during an evaluation test. It is possible that Astra was the pre-release model mentioned in that case, though there is no confirmation from OpenAI.- EndsPublished By: Armaan AgarwalPublished On: Aug 3, 2026 09:57 IST