42 leading mathematicians warn AI poses real and urgent existential risk

Forty-two Fellows of the Royal Society, including Fields Medal winners Martin Hairer, Peter Scholze and Wendelin Werner, have sent an open letter to the Royal Society's president urging Britain's academy of sciences to alert the government and media to existential risks from advanced AI; none of the signatories are affiliated with AI companies. They note that within three months, leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic solved open research problems, including one of the seven Millennium Problems, with a second likely to follow soon, and now perform at the level of top human mathematicians in many areas. The letter warns similar rapid gains could extend to cybersecurity, autonomous weapons, biological and chemical agents, and targeted misinformation, and says AI labs' existential-risk estimates above ten percent "must not be dismissed as hype," cautioning that by the time the public grasps the danger it may be too late to act.