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Matthias Bastian
Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian
Oct 17, 2026
AI in practice
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Read full article about: Anthropics' Claude cracks a 25-year-old NSA cryptography mystery in under 30 minutes

Anthropic's AI Claude has solved a 25-year-old cryptography mystery. NIST standardized several curves in the ECDSA standard, the most widely used framework for elliptic-curve digital signatures, back in 2000. The NSA had supplied the seeds, the starting values used to generate the curve parameters, with zero explanation. No one knew how they were created, and that fueled suspicion of possible backdoors. The mystery even attracted a bounty and amateur sleuthing efforts. The late NSA employee Jerry Solinas had suggested the seeds were a hash of a humorous phrase, but that turned out to be wrong.

Claude cracked it in under 30 minutes. The seeds came from "lrand48," a simple C random number generator, initialized with a Unix timestamp between May 1997 and April 1998. Claude spotted the pattern because "lrand48" only outputs 31 bits, and the top bits in some seeds were systematically zero. According to Anthropic, this makes deliberate backdoors less likely. Anthropic is donating the $36,864 bounty to the Internet Security Research Group.

Comment Source: Anthropic
Matthias Bastian
Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian
Oct 17, 2026
AI in practice
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Deepseek V4.1 Flash 1017 beats larger rivals in agentic tasks while once again massively cutting per-task costs

Deepseek has released V4.1-Flash-1017 as an open-weight model that posts better benchmarks, finishes tasks faster, and produces shorter outputs than its predecessor. The company is also opening up its internal search engine through new Search and Fetch APIs at $0.75 per 1,000 calls. API users in tools like Claude Code and Codex get free access for now.

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Matthias Bastian
Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian
Oct 16, 2026
Short News
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Read full article about: ChatGPT becomes a full Chrome browser assistant that reads and acts on your open tabs

ChatGPT can now access open tabs right in the Chrome browser and take actions on them. Users can target open tabs with @chrome, while Chat mode pulls data from several tabs at once. Work mode lets the tool control tabs through Computer Use to send messages, fill out forms, download files, or group tabs. GPT-6 Astra is the best Computer Use model on the market right now, and it can handle complex workflows with many steps.

Your full chat history now sits in the upgraded ChatGPT sidebar right next to the web page you're viewing. In OpenAI's examples, the extension compares products across open tabs by size, material, shipping time, and return rules, sums up articles in plain language, or matches up price pages from different sellers. The updated Chrome extension works with all ChatGPT plans.

Comment Source: ChatGPT via X
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Matthias Bastian
Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian
Oct 16, 2026
AI in practice
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China plans to tighten export controls on open-weight models and 23 key AI technologies

China plans to restrict exports of 23 key AI technologies, including model weights, source code, and training methods for systems hitting 10^26 FLOPs or 2 trillion parameters. A fast-track rule will still clear open-source releases as soon as they are registered, but the move will likely push Western companies to double down on US open-weight models over Chinese alternatives.

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Maximilian Schreiner
Maximilian Schreiner View the LinkedIn Profile of Maximilian Schreiner
Oct 16, 2026
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Read full article about: OpenAI's new Rosalind Academic Plan gives research labs up to 30 free seats for a year

OpenAI is launching the Rosalind Academic Plan, a free offering that's currently open only to research labs at US universities. Eligible labs get up to 30 free seats on the Business Standard plan for up to twelve months. API access isn't included.

The plan centers on GPT-Rosalind, an AI model built for the life sciences that OpenAI says supports deeper reasoning on complex biological questions. Through the Rosalind Workbench, the model connects to specialized tools for areas like medicinal chemistry, genomics, and lab experiments. Before granting access, OpenAI vets the institution, the lab's lead researcher, and the planned use. Once a lab is approved, the company monitors how the model is used.

According to OpenAI, approved researchers can work on sensitive scientific questions, but only within certain safeguards. For registered, highly sensitive applications, the safety checks factor in the approved research context, and OpenAI follows up with researchers when something is unclear. The company says it doesn't train on research data by default. Details on how to apply are in OpenAI's help center.

Comment Source: OpenAI