Cryptographers suspected the NSA's curve seeds for 25 years, Claude traced them in 30 minutes and suspected itself

Claude traces the NSA's mystery curve seeds to 1997 timestamps

NIST's elliptic curves, P-256 among them, were standardized in 2000 from seeds the NSA supplied with no explanation, which fed 25 years of backdoor theories. Asked by a staffer with no hints, an internal Anthropic research model showed in under half an hour that they came from lrand48, an old C random number generator, seeded with Unix timestamps from May 1997 to April 1998 (Anthropic). Anthropic says it's no break, and it makes a backdoor less plausible. Some base points and one binary-curve seed are still unexplained.

Awe, and relief in crypto. @petejkim: Bitcoin and Ethereum picked secp256k1 over P-256 largely out of "fear of an NSA backdoor", and "turns out there is no backdoor after all". r/singularity's top reply: "Claude is very human-like in its self doubt about its own capabilities". Another, on its chain of thought asking if it was "suspicious that such an obvious thing wasn't discovered in 25 years": "Stop mogging on us, Claude".

Anthropic staff had already tried and failed, because they followed the old clue (the seeds were supposed to be a hashed joke sentence, like "Give Bob and Jerry a raise"). The one who gave Claude no clue got it in half an hour: after 25 years stuck on one man's wrong memory, the best help we could give the model was none.

1. Anthropic says Claude could lead 80-90% of its model building next year

Michael Sellitto, its head of global affairs, told an IMF panel that Claude led 3% of the work of building Anthropic's next models in April and 26% in August. A staff poll published the same day puts the median guess at 80% by the end of 2027 (Anthropic), and a second report says its interactive agents now log six hours for every hour their humans work (report).

Read as recursive self-improvement on a timetable. @levie: "If you aren't pricing in what RSI will lead to, that's probably a mistake." r/singularity's top reply on the poll: staff "must be seeing some wild shit". Another: "All this RSI in 2027 chatter and it turns out Anthropic employees aren't sure we'll get there by 2030".

Heat: medium · 651K views, 8 posts (486K on @MTSlive's) · 130 pts on r/singularity

2. Claude now writes about 90% of Claude Code's code

From June to September, merged pull requests more than doubled while the share reverted fell by more than 40%. Anthropic wrote up the code review process it credits for that.

Praise from the team, one question from outside. Claude Code's creator @bcherny: "I could not imagine being productive without Claude Code Review." @thinking_sid: "Who writes the remaining 10%?"

Heat: medium · 941K views, 3 posts (683K on the announcement) · quiet on Reddit

3. GPT-6 Astra Pro can now split a task across parallel agents

The upgrade in ChatGPT also brings faster responses and better use of plugins and tools. You can follow each agent's progress and review its finished work. It's for Pro users, in the Chat tab.

Liked by those who tried it. @DeryaTR_: with 3 agents in parallel, GPT-6 Pro audited a very large codebase in 25 minutes, "half the usual time". @mkeremturhan: "the fastest way yet to burn through a Pro limit".

Heat: high · 1.1M views, 24 posts (1.08M on the announcement) · quiet on Reddit

4. Grok Bot finishes computer tasks 3x faster

Replies to everything else now arrive in less than half the time, and voice calls are faster and remember more of past conversations (@bot).

Musk's "Grok @Bot got much faster" (2.1M) carried it, with few takes. @thebitnomad: "Grok bot got faster, but the usage also been gone way faster now".

Heat: high · 4.7M views, 18 posts (2.1M on Musk's) · quiet on Reddit

5. Elorian's Glimpse, a model that looks again while it thinks

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The first model from ex-Google DeepMind researcher Andrew Dai's lab can crop into an image, go back to a moment in a video or replay half a second at a higher frame rate mid-answer (@testingcatalog). Elorian says it beats GPT-6 Astra on scientific chart reading and short video captioning (TechCrunch), at $0.60/$3 per million tokens (@justrehen).

Warm, mostly from early testers. @JeffDean: "Have a glimpse at this!" @omarsar0 had it read 10 game boards from an overhead camera: 8 fully correct, to Gemini 3.8 Flash's 5.

Heat: high · 2.4M views, 41 posts (1.7M on Dai's launch post) · quiet on Reddit

6. Hark launches Hark Pro by buying $1M of pizza through its agent

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Brett Adcock's company pays for the pizzas US users get by telling the app "order a free pizza" (@adcock_brett). The backend went down twice (@adcock_brett), a bug charged some users in full, and the app reached #58 on the App Store (@adcock_brett).

Pizzas arrived, with grumbles. @traviscurnutte: it "claimed a $30 DoorDash gift card, signed me in, built the order... Total charged: $0.00". @gm_mertd: "free pizza is good marketing but such a bad use case again".

Heat: high · 1.6M views, 46 posts (798K on Adcock's post) · quiet on Reddit

7. Reflection releases Beam, a 501B open-weight model

Reflection AI's first model has 23B active parameters, a 1M-token context and an Apache 2.0 license, and ships with Mirror CLI, the harness it was trained in. It scores 30 on Artificial Analysis's index, second among US open models after Muse Spark Open's 39 (@ArtificialAnlys).

Welcomed as a US option, doubted on coding. r/LocalLLaMA: "We can't use Chinese models and have been clamouring for something capable" (reply). @neuralloot: it "posts 80%+ agent coding scores on its own model card. An outside test this morning looks very different."

Heat: medium · 726K views, 31 posts (312K on the launch) · 153 pts on r/LocalLLaMA

8. An agent-run repo adds co-op to old single-player games

coop-anything gives coding agents a playbook to make single-player games co-op. Its author used it to fix or finish co-op for Deus Ex, Dungeon Keeper and Stalker, with Ocarina of Time and Fallout: New Vegas close. Agents revive old co-op mods or reverse-engineer the game with tools like REA and Ghidra, test with bots running real game clients, and send what they learn back to the repo.

r/accelerate loved it. One reply: "The real metaverse is being born. Software hyperabundance and digital walls are falling." Another: "The software singularity is looking awesome".

Heat: low · not on X · 398 pts and 75 comments on r/accelerate

Claude Mythos 5 designs quantum circuits that beat the best published ones

Working largely on its own against an automated evaluator, it improved on published designs, sometimes by an order of magnitude, Anthropic says. One 53-hour run cut gates 17x on elliptic-curve point addition for 12% more qubits, and a decoder needs 12x fewer gates than Google's. Checks were in simulation and Lean, not on hardware. It matters because smaller circuits mean a smaller quantum computer can run useful programs, and a model found these with no human between rounds.

Four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft from scratch

Using only code and text, with no roles assigned, they wrote 2,783 programs, split jobs over chat and killed the Ender Dragon in 27 hours, dying 605 times on the way (@omarsar0). DeepMind's team says it's the first end-to-end autonomous completion of Minecraft by AI agents. It matters because finishing the game takes a long chain of dependent goals, and four agents organised it themselves.