Professor Lance Dixon of SLAC and Stanford independently verified the result and noted that the AI's grasp of relevant 2019 and 2023 research papers exceeded that of most humans. The accomplishment followed a challenge issued on August 7 by physicist Matt von Hippel, which Claude finished within 25 days at a cost of roughly $1,000 to $2,000. Other teams, including a group in Beijing using GPT-6, had reached partial results, but Anthropic's tool solved the problem in one shot, scooping human teams that had spent years on the calculation.
