Anthropic AI ‘Formalizes’ Proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in Just 11 Days
Dozens of Claude agents wrote 13 million lines of Lean code and proved 30,300 intermediate theorems in a computer-checked formalization, Anthropic said.
- On Friday, Anthropic published a complete, computer-checked proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, with Claude agents writing 13 million lines of Lean code and proving 30,300 intermediate theorems.
- Mathematician Andrew Wiles completed the proof in 1994, more than 350 years after Fermat proposed the conjecture, yet Claude finished the formalization in just 11 days.
- The computational effort consumed about six billion output tokens, costing approximately $300,000, though the 13 million lines cannot currently enter Mathlib due to review bottlenecks.
- Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London wrote, 'Anthropic has beaten me to it,' while Alex Kontorovich, a theorist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, said it 'just completely blew my mind.'
- This milestone in AI-aided formalization, where machines translate mathematical arguments into computer-certifiable code, positions AI to scrutinize entire mathematical libraries and potentially identify errors in established results.
11 Articles
11 Articles
Claude Formalized Fermat’s Last Theorem In 11 Days On 6 Billion Output Tokens
Anthropic AI ‘formalizes’ proof of Fermat’s last theorem in just 11 days
Nature, Published online: 07 September 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02822-9Claude produced a 13-million-line, computer-checked proof of the famed conjecture — a major milestone in mathematics.
Claude formalised Fermat's Last Theorem in 11 days
A mathematician holds a five-year grant to formalise Fermat’s Last Theorem. It has been done for him in eleven days, and he says the result tells us nothing about mathematics. Anthropic published the proof on Friday. Dozens of Claude agents wrote 13 million lines of Lean code and proved 30,300 intermediate theorems. They used 29,500 […] This story continues at The Next Web
The post Fermat's last sentence: Anthropic-KI writes math history first appeared in the online magazine BASIC thinking. About our newsletter UPDATE you start every morning well informed into the day. Fermat's last sentence employs mathematicians for centuries. Now an AI has provided a complete, computer-tested proof for the first time. In eleven days 13 million lines of code were created. Fermat's last sentence is one of the most famous riddles …
Anthropic reported that Claude agents formalized Fermat’s Last Theorem into roughly 13 million lines of Lean in about 11 days, generating tens of thousands of intermediate theorems researchers can verify
The Direct Message Tension: A machine-generated artifact of roughly 13 million lines can be checked line by line in days, while the mathematics it encodes took humans centuries to reach and a year to fix — and neither fact makes the other less real. Noise: Headlines that compress “computer-checked formalization of a theorem proved in 1995” into “AI cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem.” Direct Message: Anthropic’s Lean run is a result about verificatio…
Fermat's last theorem, which tormented the brightest spirits for centuries, was digitally "caged" by Anthropic and his AI Claude, assisted by an IA agent squad.
Coverage Details
Bias Distribution
- 67% of the sources are Center
Factuality
To view factuality data please Upgrade to Premium
