Knowledge cannot be stollen. That concept is human fabrication. Knowledge is meant to be shared and once share is flow freely.
Stealing knowledge in an academic context means using it without credit, aka plagiarism, much unlike the common definition for media.
Attribution doesn’t restrict the flow of information, it simply gives credit where it is due. Refusing to attribute a work, strictly speaking, limits the flow of authorial information.
As stated by the article, if sharing work may be punished by a bad actor people will selfishly restrict the flow of useful information in response to protect themselves from plagiarism. Doing something that makes academics choose between further advancement of their field and their own self interest is the principle malfeasance.
::: spoiler
I’m under the impression that in most of those cases it is a matter of duplication of work, rather than plagiarism as is being discussed here.
For this problem, the reward is also 1 million dollars. Surely you’re not claiming it’s ok for Sam Altman to take the prize over someone who did the majority of the work.
I say this as someone who releases all their software under open source licenses which maximize the ability to share under the condition that attribution and the ability to further share/alter is preserved.
There is such a thing as malicious sharing of information/software/academic works, e.g. the distribution of proprietary software tools, plagiarism, etc. Harmful sharing ultimately limits the sharing of other information such as original authorship and source code. :::
tl;dr
If the Clay Math Institute knew for certain that Sam Altman was lying about authorship, they wouldn’t want to give him the prize. That makes these actions deceptive and by principles of radical sharing of knowledge, morally wrong.
I appreciate your perspective, thanks for the discussion.