THEN IT CRACKED A 20-YEAR CRYPTO MYSTERY — NIST'S CURVE SEEDS WERE JUST UNIX TIMESTAMPS

Claude has solved a cryptography mystery dating back more than 20 years, tracing the unexplained seed values behind NIST's elliptic curves to the C library's lrand48 random-number generator seeded with Unix timestamps, rather than to a hidden backdoor or a hashed secret phrase. The model found the answer in under 30 minutes, and the seed for the widely used P-256 curve took 1,842 iterations to reproduce.

The result was one of three Anthropic research stories in about twelve hours, alongside Claude redesigning quantum circuits for eight computational tasks and the company's own workforce data. Anthropic is donating the $36,864 bounty for the seed discovery to the Internet Security Research Group. A few curves remain unexplained, so the case is not fully closed, but the seeds at the center of years of backdoor suspicion turned out to come from ordinary, predictable code.