Simons Foundation, Anthropic and OpenAI commit $15M to help mathematicians adapt to AI

On 15 October 2026 the Simons Foundation announced a partnership with Anthropic and OpenAI that commits $15 million in combined funding and resources to help mathematicians respond to the fast spread of AI in their field. The foundation will manage and award the money, partly through an open call for proposals.

The funded workshops and initiatives are meant to help researchers assess recent AI-assisted results, learn and use new tools, exchange views and shape shared standards for AI use. Anthropic and OpenAI will also give AI tools and computing resources to researchers the foundation supports, including in basic science beyond mathematics. In its own post Anthropic put its share at $5 million in funding, compute and Claude access, and said the award will support workshops, conferences and lectures by domain experts.

The foundation points to its earlier backing of machine learning for science, including funding for the Lean proof assistant, which it credits with making AI-assisted proofs possible. Its president, David Spergel, said the mathematics community, rather than any single company or institution, should lead the discussion of how these tools are evaluated and adopted.