As I understand it the "loophole", if you want to call it that, is that OpenAI's custom-designed forcing function was smooth, as the rules said it had to be, but was non-analytic, consisting of some construction of "compactly supported bump functions", meaning a mass of tiny little pushes at precise points of space and time to push a vortex into blowing up the math.

Totally agree. I wouldn't quite call it clickbait, but the article does this thing I find annoying where it puts the "sensationalist" framing at the beginning (the "loophole" quote you put), but then closer to the end fully admits that it wasn't really a loophole in any case:

> It did, however, unambiguously solve the problem according to the Clay Institute’s original formulation. The official problem statement, penned in 2000 by mathematician Charles Fefferman, offers an option called “C,” in which solutions are allowed to use an external force like OpenAI’s.