The rumors that Anthropic had solved a millennium problem were absolutely everywhere last week. I'm not surprised at all that OAI took their own stab at it.

We are told in the statement that there were rumours already going around about a Stokes result (I even know about the rumors in question. It was all over twitter in the right spaces) and that Tristan contacts OpenAI about the rumors. In the message, it's pretty clear Tristan has made some result.

So either the rumors or Tristan's contact would explain it fine.