I guess by their own account they were doing competitive analysis on the product and incidentally solved NS. Probably the two companies should agree to benchmark on random diophantine systems, which are harder and more applicable anyway. It wasn't "brute force" but they did spend $10-20M over the course of a few days based on a rumor, which is ... something. The fact they're not actually taking credit, and published no insights other than "it's a vortex" shows the company really has no business in mathematics. They're not interested (the guy said as much) and it obviously won't pay the bill - rather, they were able to pre-empt an announcement they thought Anthropic may have been preparing to make.