Claude finds 663 theorems in Gödel's notes

Anthropic's AI model Claude found 663 possible theorems in Kurt Gödel's old notebooks, The Guardian reported on the 13th of November 2026. Gödel was one of the most famous logicians, experts in the rules of proof.

The 16 notebooks hold 1,009 pages from the early 1940s. Much of the text is in an old German shorthand that few people can read.

From a page a week to days

Finnish logician Jan von Plato has studied the notebooks since 2017, The Guardian reported. His team read about one page a week.

In September he gave Claude his typed copies of the pages. Within days, Claude wrote a 650 page guide to the notebooks, he said.

The checks

Von Plato ran the results through Coq, a program that checks maths proofs. About 400 passed as written, about 200 needed fixes and about 50 were false.

Claude also rebuilt a nearly complete proof about the axiom of choice, a basic rule of maths. Paul Cohen won the Fields Medal, a top maths prize, for that result in 1966.

Gödel was one step away

There is one wrong definition in the proof, von Plato said. Gödel had the right definition two years earlier, he said.

He said the notebooks hold more than a dozen ideas in logic that no one has followed up.

Below we break down the numbers

About 400 of 663 results passed as written, or about 60 percent, by our arithmetic. About 50 were false, or about 8 percent.

What is confirmed and what is not

Logic professor Joel David Hamkins has not seen the rebuilt proof, The Guardian reported. He said historians must judge how much is Claude and how much is Gödel.

Key facts

Claude listed 663 possible theorems from Gödel's 1940s notebooks.

The notebooks run to 1,009 pages.

A proof checker passed about 400 as written.

About 50 turned out to be false.