Anthropic’s Claude cracks a 25-year NSA curve mystery, what it means for bitcoin
An Anthropic research model traced five NIST elliptic-curve seeds supplied by the NSA to the lrand48 random-number generator, reproducing the published P-256 seed from a timestamp-based sequence. The finding offers a reproducible explanation for numbers that had fueled decades of backdoor suspicions, though it does not explain every curve parameter. Anthropic says users of the NIST curves do not need to take action. The discovery does not implicate Bitcoin: it uses secp256k1, whose parameters leave little scope for hidden manipulation. Separately, quantum computers could eventually threaten public-key cryptography, but no machine is currently capable of cracking Bitcoin keys. The outstanding bounty will be donated to the nonprofit behind Let’s Encrypt.
