[fact-checking!] NSA’s darkest cryptographic secret of the 1990s: it seeded its random numbers like a first-year student. Claude tested the decades-old theory of some cryptographers that the NSA secretly planted weak NIST elliptic curves behind unexplained seeds. It was a quasi-conspiracy theory which gained credibility when the agency was caught backdooring Dual_EC_DRBG. The seeds turned out not to be rigged. They were the plain output of a 1990s C random number generator, seeded with the computer clock in 1997 and 1998. Thanks to AI, the alleged backdoor is now a timestamp anyone can reproduce, and the theory is debunked. Why only now...? Claude pursued the right problem: how would 1990s software have generated them? The curves were cleared just in time to retire them in the move to post-quantum cryptography. But, but fortunately, there's something left - who decided to not use the perfectly good curve number 876? Maybe a coin toss? anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…