An Anthropic AI model has cracked one of cryptography’s longest-running whodunits, tracing numbers the NSA handed to the U.S. government in the late 1990s, which were long suspected of hiding a backdoor, to an ordinary random-number program fed with timestamps from 1997 and 1998.

It took the model just about half an hour to come up with a solution — one that cryptographers had been chasing to answer for 25 years.

Much of the internet relies on elliptic-curve cryptography, the family of mathematics that is also used to protect bitcoin wallets. It lets someone prove they hold a secret key without revealing the details of the key itself.

Think of the curve as a lock design anyone can inspect. Each person using it has their own secret key, but everyone relies on the design being difficult to break.

In 2000, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, adopted a set of curves supplied by the National Security Agency. The NSA provided those designs without explaining where some of the numbers used to generate them came from.

The secrecy became even harder to dismiss after the Snowden disclosures linked the NSA to efforts to weaken cryptographic standards. NIST later removed that tool, the Dual EC random-number generator, from its recommendations.

Those starting numbers, called seeds, were public. But the NSA never explained how it chose them, fueling years of suspicion that it had tested many alternatives until it found a curve with a weakness only it knew how to exploit.

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