Claude AI Solves 25-Year NSA Cryptography Mystery in Just 30 Minutes

Anthropic says an internal Claude research model has traced the origins of five NSA-supplied elliptic curve seeds in under 30 minutes, answering a cryptography question that remained open for roughly 25 years. The finding explains how important public security parameters were chosen, rather than exposing secret keys or breaking encryption. In a report published October 16, 2026, researchers said the seeds behind NIST curves P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 came from lrand48, an older C library random-number generator initialized with Unix timestamps. The result challenges a long-running theory that the values were hashes of humorous phrases. NSA Curve Seeds Raised Questions NIST adopted ECDSA, the Elliptic Curve Digital...

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