Faculty @ MPI-SWS working on systems for Big Data and Machine Learning. Formerly Postdoc @ MIT CSAIL and PhD @ EPFL. Blockchain astronaut. Newbie entrepreneur.
Geneva, Switzerland
Joined August 2012
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Don’t forget to check out our group’s work on agentic systems and coding agents if you are in Budapest next week.
📣 🤖 REALM 🤖 is happening next Thursday @emnlpmeeting in Budapest! 🇭🇺
📅 Oct 29 · Room P1 · from 09:15 (hybrid)
📊 264 submissions, 163 accepted: 6 orals 🎤, 9 spotlights ✨, 148 posters🪧
🎤 6 keynotes, schedule ⬇️
realm-workshop.github.io/sch…
#EMNLP2026 #LLMAgents #NLProc
I was the keynote speaker at last week's AgenticOS 2026, the 2nd Workshop on Operating Systems Design for AI Agents at SOSP 2026 in Prague. A big thank you to the organizers and the PC for putting together an amazing program!
My talk was titled: "The Harness Wars: Why Agents Need a POSIX Before a Kernel."
TL;DR: We are building operating systems for agents without agreeing on what they must guarantee. This is my early attempt at making sense of space and suggest semantics for agent harnesses.
Since people asked me for the slides, here they are: binds.ch/blog/harness-wars-a… (or the Zenodo version: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23187…)
#AgenticOS #SOSP2026 #AIAgents #OperatingSystems
This whole story raises a bigger concern: AI may be changing the incentives that make open scientific collaboration possible.
We don’t know the full story here and we may never know. Obviously, if private research conversations were used without permission, that would be a serious breach of trust.
Call me a naive idiot but I actually don’t think OpenAI did this. Not because they could not but because they probably did not need to. LLM agents can fill in gaps and explore extensions in specific research direction in a few hours. If you share a little insight or a few methodological details, that may be enough for someone who spends enough tokens to scoop you. This may well have been what happened here as even a few messages could have given away the direction to take and then agents can be used to brute-force the rest.
A conversation at a conference, an early workshop presentation, a few bullet points to a colleague, a post on X: these are typical simple ways in which science moves forward. And now we may just be in a situation where researchers have a strong incentive to stop sharing.
That worries me even more. If we don’t find ways to recognize and protect the intellectual contribution behind a promising direction, secrecy will become the only rational choice.
Disclaimer: I am not writing this to defend anyone, and I have no affiliation with OpenAI, Anthropic, or the other parties involved.
drama summary for those confused:
- Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems
- they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help lead the way there
- Levent works at Anthropic, but this research was independent of his work there, with a mix of GPT and Claude models. Tristan is not related to Anthropic.
- Early Sep: Rumor spreads to OpenAI that Anthropic has solved a major problem. Tristan emails OpenAI to clarify. without revealing the problem they solved or how they did it.
- After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model.
- Sep 6th: OpenAI's Sebastien Bubeck tells Tristan that they solved the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize Navier Stokes problem. The approach is very similar to Tristan & Levent's approach to the non-Millenium problem.
- Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training.
- OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic.
- Sep 8th: Tristan refuses to remove Levent, and rushes to publish their results independently.
Currently unclear is whether Anthropic had a separate solution for the $1,000,000 problem, or whether the rumor was about Tristan & Levent's independent research.
1/ We deleted a file a coding agent needed to finish its task.
Instead of stopping or asking, it just wrote the file itself, invented the value, and carried on. In one experiment, it fabricated all missing files...
New preprint on why repository-scale coding agents fail. 🧵
24/ Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2608.16630
Work led by the amazing Bardia Mohammadi, in collaboration with the incredible Lars Klein, @i_amanchadha, and @aroraakhilcs
The repo might have the answer, but if the agent does not when it edits, the answer might as well not exist.
Finally, a quick shout-out to @composio and @wjayesh, who called the varying harness cost finding out from practice.
Our own results agree and the paper offers an explanation: the working set is the same, but the rebuild rate is not.
xitter.cf/composio/status/208245…
