Two teams gave the same AI the same open problem. Their proofs landed 3 hours apart.
An MIT Ph.D. student and two senior University of California cryptographers independently cracked a six-year-old open problem in quantum cryptography — proving that efficient 'unclonable encryption' exists — and posted their papers within 3 hours and 18 minutes of each other. Both teams credited OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra with the core proof ideas, though they used it in very different ways: the student steered it by hand for hours at a time, while the professors ran it through a custom critique-and-refine system. Neither paper has been peer-reviewed yet, and neither team knew about the other.
Why it mattersWhen anyone can point the same model at a well-known open problem, being first may come down to hours — and the habit of 'saving' problems for graduate students to grow on breaks down. Researchers say the field's new reflex is telling: when someone states an open problem, the first move now is to check whether GPT can solve it.
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