A tough cryptographic problem that human cryptographers had been chewing on for 25 years—Claude cracked it in half an hour.
On October 16, Anthropic announced that Claude had traced the origins of the elliptic-curve seeds the NSA submitted to NIST.
It turned out they came from the old-fashioned lrand48 random number generator in a C library, combined with timestamps from 1997 and 1998.
The P-256 seed matched the 1,842nd candidate, and the entire process is reproducible.
The NSA gave these seeds to the U.S. standards body in 2000, and for 25 years nobody knew how they were generated.
This largely clears the seeds of suspicion of being a backdoor.
But two things remain unexplained: how some candidate values were filtered, and where the parameters for the other curves came from.
Anthropic also left room for caution: this is not a break of cryptography, and users of NIST curves don't need to change their keys.
Anthropic says it will donate the $36,864 bounty to the nonprofit behind Let's Encrypt.
This has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin uses a curve called secp256k1, which isn't among these curves.
When Satoshi Nakamoto chose a curve, they picked one with parameters so simple there was nowhere to hide a backdoor.
Wallet developer Pete Kim said years ago that they avoided NIST curves back then because they feared an NSA backdoor.
For wallet developers, though, this is unexpectedly good news.
The secure chips and passkeys in phones and computers only support P-256.
This should make it much easier to pursue the path of having phone security chips sign transactions directly.
A mystery that remained unsolved for 25 years, solved by AI in half an hour.
Do you think the next 25-year mystery will take another 25 years?
#比特币 $BTC
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Sources: CoinDesk (2026-10-17), Odaily (2026-10-17), cointribune/coinedition: Anthropic disclosed on October 16 that, within 30 minutes, Claude traced the five sets of elliptic-curve seeds the NSA submitted to NIST to 1997/1998 timestamps and the lrand48 random number generator; the P-256 seed matched the 1,842nd candidate. The $36,864 bounty will be donated to the Internet Security Research Group (the nonprofit behind Let's Encrypt). Bitcoin and Ethereum use secp256k1 and are unaffected (CoinDesk 10-17, thebitgazette 10-17). Google Willow's quantum advances are a separate long-term risk, unrelated to this discovery. $BTC is a mining tag corresponding to the Bitcoin cryptography content.
On October 16, Anthropic announced that Claude had traced the origins of the elliptic-curve seeds the NSA submitted to NIST.
It turned out they came from the old-fashioned lrand48 random number generator in a C library, combined with timestamps from 1997 and 1998.
The P-256 seed matched the 1,842nd candidate, and the entire process is reproducible.
The NSA gave these seeds to the U.S. standards body in 2000, and for 25 years nobody knew how they were generated.
This largely clears the seeds of suspicion of being a backdoor.
But two things remain unexplained: how some candidate values were filtered, and where the parameters for the other curves came from.
Anthropic also left room for caution: this is not a break of cryptography, and users of NIST curves don't need to change their keys.
Anthropic says it will donate the $36,864 bounty to the nonprofit behind Let's Encrypt.
This has nothing to do with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin uses a curve called secp256k1, which isn't among these curves.
When Satoshi Nakamoto chose a curve, they picked one with parameters so simple there was nowhere to hide a backdoor.
Wallet developer Pete Kim said years ago that they avoided NIST curves back then because they feared an NSA backdoor.
For wallet developers, though, this is unexpectedly good news.
The secure chips and passkeys in phones and computers only support P-256.
This should make it much easier to pursue the path of having phone security chips sign transactions directly.
A mystery that remained unsolved for 25 years, solved by AI in half an hour.
Do you think the next 25-year mystery will take another 25 years?
#比特币 $BTC
---
Sources: CoinDesk (2026-10-17), Odaily (2026-10-17), cointribune/coinedition: Anthropic disclosed on October 16 that, within 30 minutes, Claude traced the five sets of elliptic-curve seeds the NSA submitted to NIST to 1997/1998 timestamps and the lrand48 random number generator; the P-256 seed matched the 1,842nd candidate. The $36,864 bounty will be donated to the Internet Security Research Group (the nonprofit behind Let's Encrypt). Bitcoin and Ethereum use secp256k1 and are unaffected (CoinDesk 10-17, thebitgazette 10-17). Google Willow's quantum advances are a separate long-term risk, unrelated to this discovery. $BTC is a mining tag corresponding to the Bitcoin cryptography content.