In a September 16 update, XTX said it was closing the AIMO Prize and would not proceed with its Grand Prize. The stated reason is unusually specific: frontier and open-weight models had shifted the useful frontier from olympiad problems toward research mathematics, while recent leaderboard entries clustered around the same base model and notebook.
XTX says the competitions drew 8,145 participants, 274,576 submissions and awarded about $1.62 million. Participation can remain high even after a leaderboard becomes less discriminating about research direction.
The replacement spending moves toward shared infrastructure. XTX committed $10 million each to Lean FRO and the Mathlib Initiative to cover core operating costs through 2030. Lean checks proof terms; Mathlib supplies reusable formalized mathematics. XTX is also supporting three open challenges through the Foundation for Science and AI Research: Andrews–Curtis, Lean Kernel and Inverse Galois. The new mix retains targeted competitions while adding locally runnable tools, open datasets, reproducible evaluation and community infrastructure.