OpenAI's Astra and Anthropic's Opus 5 crack unsolved Enigma messages

[Sequence]

this is a brilliant story about AI passing what it calls Turing's other test. Not the famous imitation game, but the work Alan Turing is best known for in real life, breaking Nazi Enigma codes. Two frontier models have now cracked Enigma messages that had gone unsolved for years. It is the kind of story that makes you smile. It is a lovely way to mark how far these systems have come

The first came from developer Carter Leffen, who used OpenAI's newest model, Astra. It decoded a message that had remained unbroken since 2005, and it did far more than brute force. The model searched archives, researched the historical context, built its own Enigma machine simulator and then recovered the plaintext. Leffen has put together an interactive website showing how it was done

The second was solved by Jack Willis, a cybersecurity executive, using Anthropic's Opus 5. That model broke a separate unresolved message by using patterns in officers' signatures as a guide. Both solutions were checked by Frode Weierud, a retired electrical engineer who runs Crypto Cellar, a database of cryptology material. He said Astra behaved like a professional cryptanalyst and did in two days what would take human researchers weeks or months. That is high praise from an expert

There are some caveats. It is not completely clear whether Astra had access to private archive collections or German government databases along the way, which could have given it a head start. And there are still seven unsolved Enigma messages out there, so the job is not finished. Still, the approach is what impresses me, planning the research and building its own tools rather than just crunching numbers

Turing would probably have loved this. The machines he helped create are now solving the very puzzles he worked on at Bletchley Park. Does anyone think the remaining seven will fall soon? And does it worry anyone that AI is this good at breaking codes, even very old ones?

Astra and Opus just passed Turing's other test | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com

[Will81]

Two days of work replacing weeks or months is the real headline. Historians and archivists have huge backlogs of documents nobody has time to read. Tools like this could open up so much material. Old letters, diaries and records in difficult handwriting could all become searchable

[ZenithCanopy]

Enigma is a solved problem in principle, so let's not get carried away. The machine's weaknesses have been known since the 1940s. What makes these messages hard is usually missing settings, bad transcriptions or garbled text. The model still had to work through all that, which is impressive. It is just not the same as breaking modern encryption

[Deep Anvil]

Bletchley Park should put these on display. A wartime codebreaking exhibit ending with AI solving the last unsolved messages would be a perfect story for visitors