Nearly 2,000 Mathematicians Sign Leiden Declaration on AI Use and Human Oversight in Research

Nearly 2,000 mathematicians from Harvard, Oxford, Columbia University, and University of Cambridge signed the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics in June 2026. The declaration calls for increased public oversight of artificial intelligence and asserts the primacy of human autonomy in mathematical research.

It states that AI developments put the autonomy of mathematics under threat.

The document warns that increasing involvement of technology companies in mathematical research raises the risk that research questions may be prioritized because of their amenability to automated mathematics rather than expert judgment of their deeper significance.

It states that AI tends to produce plausible but unreliable or even incorrect arguments. The declaration also identifies issues with improper attribution and the use of copyrighted work in AI data corpora.

To address these concerns, the declaration requires authors to include a dedicated section in their papers detailing the use of all automated systems and large language models. It states that responsibility for the correctness and adequacy of any scientific argument remains exclusively with the human authors, who must personally verify every claim.

A study in May found 146,900 AI-generated fake citations appearing in research papers across arXiv and PubMed Central.

Leslie Ann Goldberg, head of computer science at University of Oxford, said research in mathematics almost always builds on previous research, so it is essential for researchers to know that the results in the literature are correct. Goldberg added that inaccurate AI-generated drafts are cheap to produce and there is a risk of cluttering the literature with claimed results that are simply wrong.