AI and the World's Hard Problems · Theoretical computer science · Nature · 2026-10-19
Daily briefing: How to rebuild science from ruin
Amateur cryptographers are using AI models to crack historical coded messages, such as those used by the German armed forces during the Second World War. One aspiring codebreaker used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to find the key to an unsolved cipher from 1809 in around six hours. Cryptography specialists welcome the surge of interest in codebreaking but are being overwhelmed by requests to validate AI solutions, which can often be incorrect.