Claude Traces Five NIST Curve Seeds to Old Generator

Anthropic says its Claude AI model traced the seeds used to generate five National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) elliptic curves to a familiar computer program initialized with Unix timestamps from 1997 and 1998, making a deliberate backdoor less likely. The reported analysis took less than 30 minutes and addresses a cryptographic question that had persisted for about 25 years. The seeds were supplied by the National Security Agency for curves later included in NIST standards. Because the agency did not explain how the starting values were chosen, researchers questioned whether they could have been selected to conceal a weakness. Anthropic’s finding links the five seeds to lrand48, a pseudorandom number generator available in older C software libraries. The model reportedly identified a pattern in the seeds and worked backward to reproduce them from timestamp-based inputs. Anthropic said the result reduces the likelihood that the curves were deliberately manipulated, but does not rule out every possible weakness. The reported reconstruction concerns five prime-field curves, including P-256. A separate question about the origin of the B163 seed remains outside...