Key facts
- Von Plato said Claude produced a 650-page explanation of the workbooks within a couple of days.
- Von Plato said Claude found 663 theorems in the workbooks with a proof, sketch or idea.
- Von Plato said about 400 of the 663 were verified as stated in Coq and about 200 were repaired.
- Von Plato said Claude's reconstruction of the axiom of choice independence proof passed Coq.
- Von Plato said the workbooks contain 14 themes in logic that have not been pursued.
- Joel David Hamkins of the University of Notre Dame said he had not seen the reconstruction.
A project at the University of Helsinki has used the AI model Claude to read 1,009 pages of notebooks that the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel wrote in the early 1940s, according to an account published on November 13, 2026. The Finnish logician Jan von Plato, who has led the project since 2017, said Claude produced a 650-page explanation of the material within a couple of days.
The notebooks, known as the workbooks, are written largely in Gabelsberger, a German shorthand that was obsolete even when Gödel used it. Von Plato said progress had run at about a page a week before he enlisted Claude in September, after computer scientists at an August conference in France on AI and theorem proving suggested the approach. He received a €2.5 million grant from the European Research Council for the project.
Von Plato said Claude found 663 theorems for which Gödel had a proof, a sketch or an idea. When the results were put into Coq, a program that verifies mathematical proofs, about 400 were verified as stated, about 200 were repaired and about 50 were false, he said. He said Claude's reconstruction of a proof of the independence of the axiom of choice passed Coq, and that Gödel was one step away from the result.
Joel David Hamkins, a professor of logic at the University of Notre Dame, said he had not seen Claude's reconstruction. He said that if it stood up it would be remarkable and historically interesting, though how much is Claude and how much is Gödel is a job for historians. He said material resembling Paul Cohen's proof does not mean Gödel had it.
Gödel's incompleteness theorems, published in 1931, showed that in all mathematical systems there are true statements that can neither be proved nor disproved. He fled Austria in 1940 and settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where he became a friend of Albert Einstein. He died in 1978.