- GPT-6 Astra has cracked the code on a 19th-century military cipher
- Claude AI has also been busy testing elliptical curve encryption
- Both breakthroughs highlight the increasing capabilities of AI models
AI continues to push the boundaries in almost every task it gets given, and two new reports highlight the tech's growing capabilities when it comes to code-breaking and testing widely used encryption security protocols.
First up, Japan Today reveals that AI engineer Carter Church has used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra model to crack a written code used by one of Napoleon Bonaparte's generals more than 200 years ago. The message dates from 1809, and mentions the positions of troops belonging to France and its allies.
The letter was sitting ignored in an online archive when Church decided to give it a go. Manually decoding the symbols, numbers, and letters could have taken weeks, but the AI was done in just six hours.
"What AI mostly brings is persistence," Church told AFP, adding that he felt "an unbelievable sense of satisfaction and excitement" when the result appeared. It was verified by patent engineer Satoshi Tomokiyo, who maintains an online list of unsolved ciphers for amateur cryptographers to tackle.
Curves and keys
Our second bit of AI code-breaking concerns cryptographic key generation — the methods software and hardware use to encrypt and secure data. Elliptic curves are one way to produce the keys required, and 'seeds' are starting points for these curves.
As reported by Cyber Security News, an internal Claude AI model used by Anthropic has now traced the origins of five elliptic curve seeds generated by the US National Security Agency (NSA) in less than 30 minutes. For more than 25 years, since the seeds were published, there have been claims that they contained weaknesses the NSA could use as backdoors.
Not so, Claude has now determined — there are no weaknesses, and no inside jokes. As Anthropic points out, most researchers trusted the curves already and no action is necessary, but it's a "fun closing chapter" that again demonstrates the AI's prowess.
Claude also had time for a quiet dig at human cryptographers. "Is it suspicious that such an obvious thing wasn't discovered in 25 years?" the AI asked on its way to finding the correct solution, according to the internal thinking logs. Not only are these models outperforming us at the core math, they're dunking on us along the way.