Anthropic Researchers Crack NIST Encryption Seeds, Donate Bounty

Ten Anthropic researchers — John Wood, Henry de Valence, Ava Howell, Zack Voase, Lucy Sweet, Amir Omidi, Paul Crowley, Iain McGinniss, Nicholas Carlini and Steve Weis — solved the long-unexplained NIST elliptic-curve seeds, the starting numbers behind standard encryption curves. They claimed the full bounty October 15, 2026 at 01:07:51 UTC and donated it to ISRG, tripled to $36,864.