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Anthropic's Claude Solves Decades-Old NSA Elliptic Curve Mystery
Anthropic announced that its Claude AI model solved a 25-year mystery concerning how the NSA generated seed values for NIST elliptic curves, including P-256. An internal research model determined in under 30 minutes that the seeds originated from lrand48, a basic random number generator started from a Unix timestamp. The P-256 seed traces back to 01:52:34 on August 16, 1997. Anthropic stated that the simple process makes an intentional backdoor much less plausible. The company will donate the $36,864 bounty for the solution to the Internet Security Research Group.