coindesk.comarticle

‘Wow, it’s a real discovery’: Claude cracks a 25-year NSA number mystery

CoinDesk reports that an Anthropic internal research model traced five NSA-supplied NIST elliptic-curve seeds to the C library generator lrand48 fed with 1997–98 timestamps. It matched P-256's published seed at the 1,842nd candidate, in under 30 minutes and without being told about the earlier "forgotten phrase" theory. This makes a hidden backdoor in the NIST curves less likely, though why some candidates were skipped and how other curve parameters were chosen remain unexplained. The article also explains why Bitcoin's secp256k1 was never part of the question, and that quantum risk is a separate threat.