Simons Foundation, OpenAI and Anthropic Commit $15M to Help Mathematicians Navigate AI

The Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI announced on October 15, 2026 that they will commit $15 million in combined funding and resources to help the mathematics community navigate the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.

What the money is for

According to the Simons Foundation, it will manage and award the funding, including through an open call for proposals. The money will support workshops and initiatives that help researchers:

• Evaluate recent AI-assisted results
• Learn and use new tools
• Share perspectives and shape collective standards for AI use

Anthropic and OpenAI will also provide AI tools and computing resources to researchers supported by the Simons Foundation, and the foundation says that support extends beyond mathematics to include basic science.

OpenAI’s share

In an October 15 update to its post “Sharing AI progress in mathematics,” OpenAI said it is contributing $5 million to the initiative to help mathematicians “examine, understand, and build on results produced by AI,” including the results it shared in that post. OpenAI said the funding will support workshops, conferences and special programs, and that it will give Simons Foundation-supported researchers access to its models and computing resources. Neither announcement breaks out Anthropic’s contribution.

Why now

The announcement comes nine days after OpenAI’s October 6 release of a broad set of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model, published in a GitHub repository along with formalizations of many of the proofs in Lean, a language that lets computers check mathematical proofs. The Simons Foundation notes it was an early backer of machine learning for science, including funding the development of the Lean proof assistant.

Who’s in charge

Simons Foundation President David Spergel framed the program as community-led. “The community should be driving discussions of how these tools are evaluated, adopted and used, not any single company or institution,” he said. “The goal of the program is to support the mathematics community.”