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Use Claude to solve a decades-old cryptography mystery

Anthropic's red team had Claude dig into the long-standing question of where the seeds behind NIST's ECDSA elliptic curves came from. The answer: "It's just timestamps," closing years of speculation about the standard.

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Source

ahlCVA on Hacker News · 2026-10-16 · Project link

Written in our own words. Credit to the original author. Link checked 2026-10-17.

What they did

Anthropic's red team had Claude dig into the long-standing question of where the seeds behind NIST's ECDSA elliptic curves came from. The answer: "It's just timestamps," closing years of speculation about the standard.

Result (as claimed)

Published by Anthropic Oct 16 2026; 1,005 points on Hacker News.

Tools they used

Claude

Cost: Pricing depends on the tools you pick; check each official pricing page.

Set it up

  1. Gather your sources

    Collect the papers, notes, links or files you want to work from in one place.

  2. Load them into the tool

    Open Claude and add your sources. Keep the original files so you can check claims later.

  3. Ask focused questions

    Ask for summaries, comparisons or connections with citations to the source passages.

  4. Verify and save

    Spot check claims against the sources, then save the output as notes you can reuse.

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Goal: Use Claude to solve a decades-old cryptography mystery
What the original author did: Anthropic's red team had Claude dig into the long-standing question of where the seeds behind NIST's ECDSA elliptic curves came from. The answer: "It's just timestamps," closing years of speculation about the standard.
Reported result (as claimed by the author): Published by Anthropic Oct 16 2026; 1,005 points on Hacker News.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50122800
Tools they used: Claude
Category: Research & learning

Please:
1. Ask me 3 short questions about my situation (accounts I have, budget, what I want the output to look like).
2. Propose a step-by-step plan using these tools or cheaper alternatives, with the time and cost of each step. Use official pricing pages; say "check pricing" if unsure.
3. Then do the setup with me one step at a time, waiting for my OK before anything that sends messages, posts publicly, spends money or deletes data.
4. Finish with a checklist to run it again next time.

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