Overview
- Anthropic published a GitHub repository and said Claude finished a Lean formalization of Fermat’s Last Theorem in about 11 days, claiming machine-checked verification of the full proof.
- The company reported the work includes roughly 29,500 intermediate theorems and millions of lines of Lean code, with tools that ran many Claude agents in parallel to generate and organize the files.
- Kevin Buzzard is reported to have reviewed the machine-checked chain and said it "holds up" under basic logical rules, but independent auditors and community analysts say the evidence for full autonomous authorship is not yet settled.
- The formalization builds on years of prior community work, including Mathlib and Buzzard’s ongoing Imperial College project, meaning much of the underlying definitions and libraries were preexisting scaffolding.
- The next phase is public inspection and peer review, which will confirm whether the repository meets Lean standards and will show how AI tools might speed formal verification for math and high-assurance software.