Anthropic's Claude AI cracks 25-year NSA elliptic curve seed mystery in 30 minutes

An Anthropic AI model traced five unexplained seeds for NIST elliptic curves to an ordinary random-number generator using timestamps from 1997 and 1998, completing a task cryptographers had pursued for a quarter-century in under half an hour. The finding makes a hidden NSA backdoor less likely, though the origin of the seeds remains partially unresolved. Bitcoin was unaffected as it uses a different curve, secp256k1.