Let me get this straight: Mathematics community responds to AI by threatening the participants, most of them are just students?

On September 10, mathematicians published an open letter demanding the cancellation of the Caltech Mathathon. This student-run hackathon involved 100 teams using frontier LLMs on open problems, supported by $2M in credits from Anthropic and OpenAI. The mathematics community's response to AI, particularly concerning an event primarily involving students, has been met with a perception of threatening the participants, who are often seen as innocent geniuses enjoying mathematics.

This report highlights the mathematics community's response to AI, framing it as a threat to student participants, unlike typical academic debates on technology's role.