Codex Leaks 2026 Fields Medal Winners Including Two Peking University Alumni
Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list
A leak in the ICM 2026 website code exposed the upcoming Fields Medal winners, revealing that Peking University alumni Hong Wang and Yu Deng will receive the prestigious award. This marks a historic first for Chinese mathematics, with two recipients in a single edition. Additionally, Hong Wang is set to become only the third female mathematician ever to win the Fields Medal, highlighting a groundbreaking moment for the field.
This marks a historic moment as it is the first time two Chinese mathematicians will receive the prestigious award in the same edition.
- sixtyj
> The leak occurred when four Fields Medal laureate lecture fields, marked "HIDDEN," were discovered in the front-end code of the ICM 2026 official schedule.
So it was easier than I thought. Bot just scraped public page with hidden fields, not a secret page or to-be-published page from database.
- edoceo
I've been working on a site. It's new, domain is only a few weeks old. It's got SSL, so all the bots know it exists. It's never had any sub-pages exposed, just the placeholder lander, no links.
Somehow in Google search one of the unguessable pages is indexed. We have used Claude and Gemini to assist with some design aspects.
I'm thinking some aggressive data ingestion/indexing is happening by all the bots in the quest for frontier models.
- ashu1461
Someone used Codex to scrape the ICM website schedule and discovered that the winners list was simply hidden in the front-end code with a "hidden" tag
This is on the devs and feels like a very basic leak which could have exploited in the non LLM world as well.
- efficax
twist: codex also wrote the code that placed the winners list in a hidden element
- zaikunzhang
Related to the earlier discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48902814
See also
Zhihu (Chinese Reddit): https://www.zhihu.com/question/2060133066643879544/answer/20...
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1urv4id/comment/oxak6...
- netvarun
First of all congrats to the winners.
Second, fitting that codex enters the picture.
The last time the fields medals were announced llms were still very nascent :)
And I am convinced this is the last time pure human fields medalists will be announced.
The next batch’s winners are all going to have llms as coauthors.
- bananaflag
This is sad, almost as sad as the Deathly Hallows pre-release leak.
- logicallee
really tacky of the finders to disclose the names.