Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude
Claude Mythos found cryptographic weaknesses in HAWK and reduced-round AES after 60 hours and ~$100K in API costs
“no we don't want to change the targets [...] agian we need to find something that worth publishing”
Anthropic researchers used Claude Mythos (Fable) in a 60-hour autonomous research session costing an estimated $100K in API calls to discover mathematical weaknesses in the HAWK signature scheme and a reduced-round AES variant. The results have no immediate practical security impact but demonstrate frontier models performing genuine novel cryptographic research. Notably, the published prompts reveal researchers had to repeatedly push the model past defeatism and toward ambitious findings.