A frontier model solved a long-standing cryptographic provenance question in under 30 minutes without hints, a concrete data point on autonomous research capability. The post says no action is needed for ECDSA users.
Key takeaways · AI-distilled
Anthropic says the P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 seeds came from repeatedly drawing 20-byte candidates from lrand48 seeded with a Unix timestamp; P-256's seed came after 1,842 iterations.
The best-known story, from NSA's Jerry Solinas, that the seeds were a hash of a humorous passphrase turned out to be wrong. Several Anthropic employees had chased that lead without success.
Instead, Claude guessed the generator was a weak 1990s C-library PRNG and wrote a scanner that slid along each seed bit by bit, testing whether chunks were consecutive outputs across 34 generator and slice combinations.
Anthropic says this is not a break or weakness: a clock-seeded common PRNG that anyone can reproduce leaves much less room for a deliberate backdoor in the curves.
