Anthropic said on July 28 that its AI model, Claude, discovered new ways to attack cryptographic algorithms. It did the work faster than human experts, and one of its targets was a scheme bui
Anthropic said on July 28 that its AI model, Claude, discovered new ways to attack cryptographic algorithms.
It did the work faster than human experts, and one of its targets was a scheme built to survive the arrival of quantum computers.
To be clear, no blockchain tech was broken, and no wallet is at risk today. But the research pokes directly at a question Bitcoiners have been asking since the quantum threats: what happens to Bitcoin when computers powerful enough to break its security finally exist?
Related: BlackRock, Coinbase and MicroStrategy prepare for scary 'Q-Day'
In simple terms, Anthropic used Claude to hunt for weaknesses in cryptography, and it found some.
Its biggest result weakened a signature scheme called HAWK — one of the leading candidates to become a new, "quantum-proof" standard. Claude cut HAWK's security strength roughly in half in about 60 hours of work, after the scheme had already survived two years of review by human cryptographers.
HAWK isn't used by any live system, and none of the findings break the encryption protecting today's internet or blockchains.
"In just one year, language models have gone from being unable to perform cryptanalysis of even the most basic ciphers to being capable of finding flaws in cryptographic designs that have escaped discovery despite years of human expert review." wrote Anthropic, in its research post
When you send Bitcoin, your private key signs the transaction to prove the coins are yours. That system — an algorithm called ECDSA — is the lock on every wallet.
The long-term worry is that a powerful enough quantum computer could one day break ECDSA and pull private keys from public information, letting an attacker steal coins.
Analysts estimate roughly 6.7 million BTC — around $600 billion — sit in wallets that would be exposed to such a machine. That machine doesn't exist yet, but the threat is taken seriously enough that Bitcoin developers have already drafted a plan (BIP-361) to move coins onto new, quantum-resistant signatures, and NIST finalized its first quantum-proof standards in 2024.
