I don't think this part is accurate. OpenAI was researching Navier Stokes before. It's possible that they started on a new approach after hearing of Tristan's success, however that is not proven and I expect we will hear OpenAI's side of the story today.
"The route to the Clay problem through a smooth force, options c and d in Fefferman’s statement of the problem, is the route Luis and Diego opened and the one Levent and I had quietly chosen to attack. Almost nobody else I know of was working on it. It is not the direction one arrives at in a few days by giving a model the problem statement. When I heard “forced,” it was a bright red flag."
Whether or not they were researching it before isn't the concern.
The most nefarious explanation seems to be that they got wind it was possible to solve NS via LLMs and perhaps a small nudge in the right direction.
The open question was whether their LLM got the nudge in the right direction because it got access to the chat somehow (e.g. automated training that scraped his chat logs) or just a high level "Navier stokes can be solved through LLM". It sounds like the former may have happened although right now we just have an accusation and a weak denial.
The compute was used to leapfrog the human team, using their ideas and pushing them to a solution of the general problem.
Plagiarism isn’t being used in the literal sense.
"It is true that we tried this because there were rumors on the internet last week that Anthropic's models had solved a millennium problem and we were curious if ours could do it too."