cryptography

According to Anthropic, Claude worked out in under 30 minutes how the NSA generated the seeds behind several NIST-standardized elliptic curves. The seeds came from the C generator lrand48, initialized with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998. Anthropic is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.

Carter Leffen, a product development coach at Bloomberg LP, says he used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to decrypt an 82-character Enigma-encrypted Wehrmacht radio message from July 1941 that had gone unsolved for 83 years. The AI agent reportedly spent about 10 hours building an Enigma simulator, testing keys, and cross-checking results before landing on a decryption confirmed by an archived message header.

According to testing firm Vals AI, Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.1 independently identified and solved the 'Cyphral Distich,' a 1653 numeric cipher by Sir Thomas Urquhart that had defeated other frontier models. The AI decoded a hidden pro-royalist message by mapping each number to a word in Urquhart's original text.

Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview model independently discovered a new cryptanalytic attack on a reduced version of AES-128 and improved an existing attack on the post-quantum signature scheme HAWK. Each research run cost roughly $100,000 in API fees, with human researchers largely limited to project management and verification.