Morning Minute: Claude Mythos Breaks Post-Quantum Cryptography
Anthropic said an unreleased Claude model found two new attacks on cryptography, including one against HAWK, a post-quantum digital signature scheme being considered for a U.S. federal standard. The model discovered a mathematical symmetry that cut the effort to break HAWK’s smallest key from about 2^64 operations to 2^38, forcing a fix that would roughly double key sizes and weaken HAWK’s main advantage: compact signatures and low fees. HAWK has not been deployed, and current crypto systems like Bitcoin’s ECDSA are unchanged, but the finding highlights a major risk: post-quantum replacements must still prove secure. The result raises the stakes for ongoing quantum-readiness efforts across crypto, since AI may now be able to break new schemes as fast as the industry can design them.
