AI Decrypts Napoleonic Cipher and Debunks NSA Backdoor Theories

Artificial intelligence is solving long-standing cryptographic mysteries at speeds that far exceed human capabilities. Carter Church, an AI engineer, used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra model to decrypt a 19th-century military cipher from 1809 in six hours. The message, written by one of Napoleon Bonaparte's generals, detailed the positions of French and allied troops; a task that typically would have required weeks of manual effort.

In a separate development, an internal Claude AI model from Anthropic analyzed five elliptic curve seeds generated by the National Security Agency in under 30 minutes. The AI's findings debunked 25-year-old theories suggesting the seeds contained NSA backdoors.

While these breakthroughs highlight the mathematical prowess of modern models, the rapid pace of discovery has drawn mixed reactions. Some cryptographers note that the ease with which AI solves these difficult problems diminishes the satisfaction traditionally found in manual discovery.