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Achieving a flawless score at the world's most prestigious mathematics competition was long reserved for a select group of gifted young minds each year. This year, however, artificial intelligence has matched that feat for the first time.
The Chinese tech company Xiaohongshu, known as RedNote in English, said its AI model achieved 100% on the questions given to human hopefuls at this month's International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). It was among the first AI labs to announce its score, while other prominent models from around the world have quickly followed suit.
"We are delighted with this result, because achieving a perfect score at the IMO is extremely challenging," Xiaohongshu said in a statement this week. "Previously, no large language model had ever achieved a perfect score under the IMO's official judging process," the firm added, referring to the tech that underpins AI tools like chatbots.
In 2025, models made by the likes of Google and OpenAI reached gold-level scores for the first time, but they could not match the abilities of the human contestants who got 100%.
This year, 666 contestants from different countries took part in Shanghai. Just seven of them achieved full marks, according to the official IMO scoreboard. Participants at the IMO, held in different locations each year, must be aged under 20.
Huawei said Wednesday that its AI system "Celia" had shown "comprehensive problem-solving capabilities" across several mathematical fields. Xiaohongshu said its model "dots-note-3.0" had entered the IMO for the first time this year.
Tech firms were only provided with the IMO problems after human contestants had taken the exam, with their submissions required within a specified time limit.
"During testing, any form of human intervention was strictly prohibited," and the AI solutions were submitted to IMO organizers for grading, Xiaohongshu said.
AI's progress has been fast: at the 2024 IMO, Google achieved a silver-medal score, solving four of the six problems over two to three days. Deedy Das, a partner at the U.S.-based investment firm Menlo Ventures, said he had given this year's IMO questions himself to four cutting-edge AI models.
All four, from leading U.S. labs OpenAI and Anthropic, the startup Axiom Math and Kimi K3 from China's Moonshot AI, scored 42 points out of 42, he said on LinkedIn.
"The frontier of AI has officially moved well past IMO math," Das wrote.
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