Claude solves a decades-old mystery about the NIST cryptographic curves

On 16 October, Anthropic reported that an internal research model had settled an old question in cryptography in under half an hour: where the "seeds" of the NIST standard's elliptic curves, widely used in digital signatures, came from. They weren't the result of hashing a phrase, as rumoured, but the output of an ordinary random number generator, started from the clock time in 1997 and 1998. Anyone can check it with the published code.

According to Anthropic, this doesn't weaken the curves and makes it less plausible that they hide a backdoor. Along the way, the model asked itself whether it was in a simulated or test environment before concluding that the finding was real.