Anthropic: Claude traces NIST ECDSA curve seeds to a 1990s RNG

Anthropic

Research official + media 2 src. ~1 min

In an Anthropic Frontier Red Team post dated October 16, 2026, Claude reconstructed the provenance of NIST ECDSA elliptic-curve seed values, linking them to a 1990s random number generator; media coverage describes the work as solving a ~25-year cryptography question in a short session.

Why it matters

First-party confirmation that a production model can carry out long-horizon historical forensics on public cryptographic constants, a class of open-ended reverse-engineering few automated systems could do.

Importance: 3/5

notable release (major version, significant open-weights drop, or regulatory shift)

cryptography red-team

Sources

official Anthropic Research

media Unite.AI