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confirmed (researcher + independent verification)

Claude traces the NIST P-curve seeds to lrand48 seeded with 1997-98 timestamps; no backdoor, no action needed

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team (Oct 16) says Claude worked out, in under half an hour, that the unexplained seeds for NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 were not hashes of a phrase but output of the C library's lrand48/drand48 generator seeded with Unix timestamps. P-256's seed is candidate 1,842 from srand48(871696354), which is 1997-08-16 01:52:34 UTC. Filippo Valsorda reimplemented the algorithm in Go, confirmed it, and paid out his seeds bounty (tripled to $36,864, donated to ISRG). Anthropic says this is not a break and needs no action. Gaps remain: one binary-curve seed and several base points are still unexplained. For defenders it's mainly a data point on AI doing real cryptanalysis-style research by writing its own analysis tools.

Sources: Anthropic: Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins · Filippo Valsorda: bounty claimed