Anthropic's Claude solves 25-year-old NSA cryptography mystery in under 30 minutes

Anthropic's AI model Claude solved a 25-year-old cryptography mystery by identifying the seeds for NIST's P-256 elliptic curve parameters. The seeds originated from the C random number generator lrand48, initialized with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998. Claude identified the pattern because lrand48 only outputs 31 bits, leaving the top bits of some seeds systematically zero. Anthropic is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.