Are AI Labs Trying to Break Encryption?

A theoretical computer scientist named Scott Aaronson, citing unnamed sources, recently reported that AI labs have begun "gingerly and discreetly investigating whether their latest internal models can break important cryptographic protocols and primitives." Aaronson noted that cryptography is "conspicuous by its absence from OpenAI's list of 376 papers" and argued that if AI models can break encryption, "it would certainly be nice to get ahead of things before the rest of the world figures out the same."

This warning landed in a specific context: OpenAI had just released hundreds of new mathematical findings across algebra, theoretical computer science, and mathematical logic. Last month, the company used a team of 10,000 autonomous AI agents working in parallel to solve the Navier-Stokes equation—one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics and physics—in just 88 hours. "Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long held unquestioned hypotheses have fallen," wrote Ethereum researcher Justin Drake.

The Crypto-Specific Risk