An AI just solved a 25-year-old mystery in cryptography
This is original cryptanalysis on a problem humans left open for 25 years, and a model did it.
Anthropic asked a research model how the NIST ECDSA curve seeds were made. The NSA supplied those seeds in the 1990s and never explained them. Thirty minutes later the model had the answer: the seeds came from lrand48, a weak random number generator in old C libraries, seeded with Unix timestamps from 1997 and 1998. It got there by writing a scanner, spotting a pattern in the top bits, and recovering the generator states. Ten of the seeds now regenerate exactly, bit for bit. Anthropic says this makes the curves look safer, if anything.
Source: anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins
My read: this is original cryptanalysis on a problem humans left open for 25 years, and a model did it.
Your pick: give a model one stuck problem from your own work this week. Skip the rumored hints, and verify every claim by computation.
12 months: models routinely assist on open research problems.
24 months: AI-assisted discoveries become normal in security audits.
36 months: “AI found it” becomes a standard line in papers.
Why I may be wrong: this is one curated story from Anthropic about its own model, and nobody can rerun it on demand.
So: skill, or a lucky search?