Claude Solved the NSA's 25-Year NIST Crypto Mystery in 30 Minutes
Anthropic said on Friday that an internal Claude research model has finally answered one of cryptography’s most stubborn questions: where the mysterious seed values behind the NIST elliptic curves came from. The answer, published in an October 16, 2026 research report and reached in under 30 minutes, was almost aggressively boring. “It’s just timestamps,” the company’s post begins. That’s the punchline, and it’s a good one. For roughly 25 years, researchers worried the NSA had cherry-picked the parameters of the internet’s most widely used cryptographic curves, or worse, slipped in a hidden weakness. What Claude found was a garden-variety C-library random-number generator, started with the computer’s clock, run on some workstation sometime between May 1997 and April 1998. Cryptographer Filippo Valsorda, who had put up a $36,864 bounty for the answer, independently reimplemented the solution in Go, confirmed the match, and saw the money donated to the Internet Security Research Group. ...