Anthropic's Claude AI Breaks Post-Quantum Signature Scheme HAWK, Dealing Fatal Blow to Its Standardization Prospects

Anthropic's Claude Mythos AI has dealt a fatal blow to the post-quantum signature scheme HAWK by producing a successful key recovery attack, effectively ending its standardization prospects, while also achieving a modest improvement on reduced-round AES attacks that poses no real-world threat to current encryption.

• Anthropic's Claude Mythos AI model produces two new cryptanalysis results: a key recovery attack against the post-quantum signature scheme HAWK, effectively killing its chances of standardization, and a modest improvement on existing reduced-round AES attacks that poses no real-world threat to deployed encryption.
• The HAWK result is significant because it applies no fundamentally new mathematics, instead synthesizing existing known tools more thoroughly than humans had previously done, demonstrating that AI excels at exhaustive, systematic cryptanalytic work without deep human intervention.
• While AI models are rapidly advancing in their ability to produce real cryptanalytic breakthroughs, human expert verification remains a critical bottleneck, and the timing is seen as fortunate since the world is already mid-transition to new post-quantum cryptographic standards.