According to CoinMeta, Claude solved a cryptography puzzle that had persisted for 26 years with NSA in less than 30 minutes. Claude discovered that the “random” seed used in NSA for cryptographic curves (such as P-256) was actually generated by simple timestamps from 1997 and 1998. Since NIST released these curves in 2000, no one had been able to explain this phenomenon. This discovery earned a prize of $36,864, which will be donated to internet security research groups. Anthropic noted that this is not a weakness in the curves and makes concerns about backdoors “even less credible.”