Claude Traced the NSA's 25-Year Crypto Seeds to a 1997 Clock
TechPulse USA News Desk — 18 October 2026 For twenty-five years, the most suspicious numbers on the internet had no explanation, and cryptographers assumed the worst: that America's spy agency had rigged the maths. The answer, it turns out, is almost embarrassingly ordinary. Somebody's computer clock did it — and an AI figured that out in about the time it takes to drink a coffee. Anthropic said this week that an internal Claude research model traced the unexplained seeds behind five NIST elliptic curves to lrand48 , a random-number generator that shipped in C libraries of the 1990s, seeded with Unix timestamps. The published seed behind P-256 — the curve that signs and protects a vast share of web traffic — was simply the 1,842nd 20-byte candidate drawn from a generator started at 01:52:34 UTC on 16 August 1997. It took the model under half an hour. Photo: The NSA's headquarters at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. The agency supplied the unexplained curve seeds to ...