A cryptographers’ suspicion that refused to die has a mundane answer. Anthropic reported on October 16 that Claude traced the unexplained seeds behind NIST’s elliptic curves to a simple C random number generator seeded with Unix timestamps.
Background: when NIST adopted the curves in 2000, the standard published seed values whose hashes define each curve. The NSA supplied them without explanation, which bred years of backdoor speculation, an amateur sleuthing effort and a cash bounty.
The late NSA mathematician Jerry Solinas had suggested the seeds came from hashing a joke phrase. That was wrong. Claude found the values match lrand48 output initialized sometime between May 1997 and April 1998.
The tell was arithmetic. lrand48 emits only 31 bits, so the top bits of some seeds sat at zero in a pattern no hash function would produce. According to Anthropic, that removes a deliberate trapdoor as an explanation for the seeds themselves.
Anthropic came to the question through an internal employee request rather than an outside commission. It is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group. The lab is also explicit that nothing about deployed systems needs to change.
