Even if that were true, they've already admitting to throwing vast quantities of resources to scoop a researcher who was about to publish (because they'd learned, somehow, of his breakthrough). If that doesn't bother you I think you need to take a step back and have a good think about this.
*to scoop a team working with Anthropic, their chief competitor.
Also, they didn't have the solution. They had a lesser problem no one cared about.
My understanding is that the Euler solution was in fact a significant achievement, but it's well short of Navier-Stokes (Euler doesn't include viscosity). It's not clear whether Buckmaster and Alpöge's approach would have eventually led to a full Navier-Stokes solution or how long it would have taken.
First to publish -- it's always been this way.
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