OpenAI and other labs' AI models have solved decades-old math problems, prompting cryptography experts to debate whether powerful AI could bypass private keys and break encryption. Whitfield Diffie, a co-inventor of public-key cryptography, said he expects major changes in mathematics and cryptanalysis but cannot gauge the timeline — a year may be too soon and five years may not be enough. Martin Hellman is more optimistic, while Johns Hopkins professor Matthew Green said public-key cryptography may be obsolete and predicted frontier AI could fundamentally break elliptic-curve cryptography within two years; Cloudflare's 2025 report says X25519 is used by most internet traffic. A Princeton computer science professor argued well-studied mainstream algorithms will likely stay safe, but less-studied ones, including many post-quantum candidates, could be broken or weakened; in July Anthropic said its AI nearly broke a NIST post-quantum candidate algorithm and had briefed the US government and industry partners beforehand. OpenAI did not respond on whether its internal models were used against cryptography.

OpenAI·Anthropic·Astra·+5