AI Cracks 1809 Napoleonic Cipher and Traces NSA Encryption Seeds

Japan Today reported that AI engineer Carter Church found the 1809 letter in an online archive and used GPT-6 Astra to decode its symbols, numbers and letters. The message mentions the positions of troops belonging to France and its allies. Church told AFP that manually decoding the message could have taken weeks, but the AI finished in six hours. Patent engineer Satoshi Tomokiyo, who maintains an online list of unsolved ciphers for amateur cryptographers, verified the result. Church said AI mostly brings persistence and described an "unbelievable sense of satisfaction and excitement" when the result appeared, according to the report.

The second case, reported by Cyber Security News, concerned cryptographic key generation, the methods software and hardware use to encrypt and secure data. Elliptic curves are one way to produce the keys required, and "seeds" are starting points for those curves. According to the report, the Claude model traced the origins of five elliptic-curve seeds generated by the NSA in less than 30 minutes. The seeds had been published for more than 25 years, and during that time there had been claims that they contained weaknesses the NSA could use as backdoors.

Claude determined that there were no weaknesses and no inside jokes, Cyber Security News reported. Anthropic said most researchers already trusted the curves and that no action was necessary, but described the finding as a "fun closing chapter" that demonstrated the AI's capabilities. The report said internal thinking logs showed Claude asking, "Is it suspicious that such an obvious thing wasn't discovered in 25 years?" while working toward the correct solution. TechRadar noted that the model was not only performing the core mathematical work but also commenting on human cryptographers' prior efforts.

Editor's Summary

Two AI-assisted code-breaking exercises reported by TechRadar show GPT-6 Astra decoding an 1809 Napoleonic military letter in six hours and an Anthropic Claude model tracing five NSA elliptic-curve seeds in under 30 minutes. The historical deciphering was verified by cipher expert Satoshi Tomokiyo, while Anthropic said the elliptic-curve finding required no action because the curves were already trusted. The reports describe AI models taking on cryptanalysis and encryption-testing tasks.