Two AI Systems Posted a Perfect Score at the 2026 Math Olympiad
Huawei's Celia and RedNote's dots-note-3.0 each scored a perfect 42 out of 42 at the 2026 International Mathematical Olympiad under the competition's own grading — a first. Four more frontier models reportedly matched that score days later, but only in an unofficial test graded by another AI, not by IMO judges.
Two AI systems — Huawei's Celia and RedNote's dots-note-3.0 — solved all six problems at the 2026 International Mathematical Olympiad and received a perfect 42 out of 42 from the competition's own graders, the first time a language model has cleared the IMO's official judging process at full marks.
The exam was held in Shanghai on July 15-16, 2026, alongside 666 human contestants; the closing ceremony followed on July 22. Only seven of those students matched the AI systems' score, a reminder of how rare a clean sweep is even among the world's strongest teenage mathematicians.
The IMO's AI track runs under strict conditions: companies receive the six problems only after the human competition has finished, submit written solutions inside a fixed window, and are barred from any human intervention during that time. Submissions are graded by IMO's own coordinators against the same rubric applied to student papers — one that rewards a complete, gap-free proof, not just a correct final answer.
That distinction matters because a year earlier, in 2025, Google DeepMind and OpenAI each reported 35 out of 42 at the same competition — gold-medal level, but short of perfect — using verification methods outside the IMO's own channel. The jump from 35 to 42 in a single year marks the point where the exam's hardest six-problem, two-day format produced its first flawless AI papers under the organizers' own scoring.
A parallel, unofficial track shows why the word "official" carries weight here. Days after the results, investor Deedy Das ran the same problem set through four more frontier systems — Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Kimi K3, and the Lean-based prover AxiomProver — and reported that all four also reached 42 out of 42. But those scores were graded by Claude-based agents in Das's own harness, not by IMO judges; Das's own notes describe the results as "strong but not authoritative."
The gap between the two tracks is the actual story. An official IMO grade means a human coordinator read a natural-language proof against the same bar used for a sixteen-year-old's paper and found no gap in logic. A self-administered grade means one chatbot decided whether another chatbot's proof holds up — a lower and far less tested bar, whatever the raw number reads.
RedNote said it plans to open-source dots-note-3.0 "in the near future," without giving a date. The model is still described as the lightest, beta-stage entry in the company's dots3 family, alongside two larger variants aimed at heavier workloads.