The discovery debunks a longtime theory that the National Security Agency had planted a backdoor in the elliptic curve algorithm, as the seeds are now reproducible using public Python code. During its reasoning process, Claude expressed skepticism that it was in a simulated environment before confirming the results. In response to the discovery, Anthropic's researchers donated a $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group, the non-profit entity that operates Let's Encrypt.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
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Claude's Trace of NIST Seeds to Unix Clocks Ends NSA Backdoor Theory
AI2 days ago
Bitcoin developer Gregory Maxwell has disputed the novelty of Anthropic's reveal that its Claude AI cracked a 25 year cryptography mystery, claiming the investigation was a straightforward query he pursued nearly a month before the company's announcement. An internal research model from Anthropic solved the mystery in under 30 minutes by identifying the 'lrand48' function from 1990s C libraries as the source of the NIST P-256 seed and 13 other curve values. The AI traced the seeds to simple Unix timestamps ranging from May 1997 to April 1998, a finding cryptographer Filippo Valsorda independently verified.
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