More than 150 mathematics professors from across Europe, Japan, and the United States have signed the Leiden Declaration, a formal statement calling on the global mathematical community to resist promoting artificial intelligence developers and urging governments in particular not to accept at face value the claims being made about the mathematical capabilities of current artificial intelligence systems. The declaration was endorsed by the International Mathematical Union, with its vice president Ulrike Tillmann writing that artificial intelligence opens new and exciting opportunities but also raises questions that cannot be left unexamined, and that the future of mathematical research must be guided by human judgment, fair and transparent practices, and the shared values of the global mathematical community.
The mathematicians fear that increased use of artificial intelligence in the field could incentivise trend-chasing research that exploits new tools at the expense of other important mathematical problems, short-circuit peer review systems, and put researchers at the service of artificial intelligence developers rather than allowing the self-directed free inquiry that has historically characterised university-based mathematical research. The declaration also identifies broader potential harms from artificial intelligence including its applications in warfare, mass surveillance, political disruption, and environmental damage, and urges individual mathematicians to evaluate the ethical consequences of their research and, if necessary, withdraw from harmful work.
The declaration warns that artificial intelligence could undermine mathematics by flooding the field with plausible but flawed proofs, weakening attribution of ideas and results, shifting research incentives in commercially convenient directions, and giving technology companies too much influence over what questions mathematicians choose to pursue. Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London, noted that mathematicians should find it striking that technology companies have suddenly become interested in their work, suggesting the motivation is not purely academic. The declaration recommends that professional organisations develop artificial intelligence-use guidelines for publication and peer review, protect researchers from having their work used as training data without consent, and actively prepare to become involved if major mathematical results are claimed through unconventional means.
For policymakers, the recommendations are direct: protect the rights of authors, regulate the artificial intelligence industry, and invest in public computational infrastructure. The declaration specifically warns that technology companies have a strong commercial incentive to overstate the capabilities of their products, advising governments to approach such claims with appropriate scrutiny rather than treating performance benchmarks from elite competitions or alleged solutions to longstanding open problems as straightforward evidence of general mathematical intelligence. The Leiden Declaration arrives at a moment when multiple major artificial intelligence laboratories have made increasingly bold claims about their systems’ mathematical reasoning abilities, with some asserting that current models can solve problems at the level of international competition participants. The mathematical community’s collective response through the declaration signals a significant divergence between the claims being made by the artificial intelligence industry and the assessment of domain experts most qualified to evaluate them.
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