Claude traces mystery NIST curve seeds to a 1990s random number generator

For decades nobody knew where the NSA-supplied "seed" values behind NIST's P-256 and related elliptic curves came from, which fed suspicion of a hidden backdoor. Anthropic says an internal research model worked it out in under half an hour: the seeds came from the old C library's lrand48 random number generator, started from Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998, not from a hashed joke phrase as rumoured. Anthropic published code anyone can run to reproduce the seeds and says this is not an attack or weakness; it makes a deliberate backdoor less plausible. Some questions stay open, including why a few usable candidates were skipped and how most base points were chosen, and the $36,864 bounty goes to the Internet Security Research Group. On Hacker News (about 630 points and about 260 comments), there is no consensus. The biggest subthread, about 98 comments, starts from a worry that labs and their government partners get model access the public does not; many replies there dispute that this kind of task would be blocked. A second camp, led by fidotron, says showing how the seeds were made says nothing about how they were selected, since discarded candidates cannot be seen; FiloSottile replied that the search space was far too small for that kind of selection to plausibly hit a weak curve. Others joked about decades of conspiracy theories ending, and one of the original bounty sponsors said they were thrilled to pay their share. A smaller camp called it a nothing burger, since knowing which generator was used does not change the curves. One commenter credited the model with choosing a new angle on its own; others said Claude was prompted to work from first principles. Sorted take: Nothing to change in your security setup; the useful idea is asking AI how something was likely made, instead of handing it the rumour.