Research

Claude quietly breaks a NIST post-quantum cipher candidate, and a NIST team pulls it from consideration

Anthropic disclosed that an unreleased specialist model, Claude Mythos Preview, found a genuine structural weakness in HAWK, a lattice based signature scheme under consideration in NIST’s post-quantum standardization process, cutting its effective security roughly in half. The same model produced a much faster attack on a reduced, seven round version of AES, 200 to 800 times quicker than the previous best known method, though the model itself initially called the task “impossible.” Within a day of the disclosure, HAWK’s authors withdrew the scheme from NIST’s additional signature process.

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