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The story
In 1941, the German military transmitted an 82-character Enigma-encoded message known as “MVUEH” that went unsolved for decades — and it’s now been reported that OpenAI’s new model “GPT-6 Astra” has cracked it. Frode Weierud, who runs the cryptography research site “Crypto Cellar Research,” has verified the recovered key and plaintext as correct. On 5ch, opinions split between skepticism about the cost-effectiveness — “modern ciphers like AES are already secure, so why burn a massive data center cracking an old one?” — and admiration that “there’s value in AI pulling off what humans couldn’t for years.” Some also worried the decryption hasn’t been fully verified.
“GPT-6 Astra” Cracks 82-Character Enigma Cipher Unsolved for Years, Even Wrote Its Own Decryption Program
An 82-character Enigma-encoded message known as “MVUEH,” transmitted by the German military in 1941 and subject to decades of decryption attempts, has now been solved through research using OpenAI’s AI model “GPT-6 Astra.”
Cryptography researcher Frode Weierud, who runs the research site “Crypto Cellar Research,” has also confirmed the results, judging the recovered key and plaintext to be correct.
Source: cryptocellar.org / Original article here
What people said
Burning a giant data center on this kind of pet project seems like a massive waste of money — probably a drain on the books.
And 'cipher' or not, modern crypto like elliptic-curve encryption and AES is basically unbreakable already.
Isn't the point less about cracking the cipher itself, and more that it pulled off something humans worked hard at but never managed?
Linear B, Rongorongo, and the Voynich Manuscript are ahead in the queue, so hold on.
so it's a lock that espionage becomes impossible inside China's domestic surveillance state.
a luxury only a giant data center can afford to attempt.
We'll be able to say an AI has caught up to that level of performance once it can crack the cipher below.
*Whether the AI below still needed human assistance is unclear.
'Claude Fable 5.1 Cracks 370-Year-Old Unsolved Cipher "Cyphral Distich" in Under a Day'
September 17, 2026, 6:00 AM
https://gigazine.net/news/20260917-fable-solves-cyphral-distich/
If a human assists alongside the AI, it might be possible to expose crimes involving energy weapons.
GPT-6 Astra came out on August 1, 2026
so I guess the AIf from Re: #16 won't catch up to GPT-6 Astra until at least early November 2026 or so, huh?
"AIf ga GPT-6 Astra"
↓
"AI ga GPT-6 Astra" (fixing my typo above — extra character in "AI")
Can't rule out here that it's just a plausible-sounding hallucinated answer.
It also claims to have decrypted all the previously unsolved ciphertexts, but whether those are actually correct is still under verification.
maybe it just accessed that.
I recall some book covering this over 20 years ago,
so is this really that big a deal when you think about it?
Roughly, the meaning is:
"Please advise march route. Am located at Rosenow, Rosenow. Reply by radio immediately."
Doesn't that mean even their own side couldn't read it? lol
Humans built the thing.
Treating it like some grand mystery is just people killing time.
We're truly in the middle of the ASI (artificial superintelligence) era.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
The Enigma cipher is generally considered to have been almost entirely broken during World War II, but in practice, a portion of the huge volume of ciphertext intercepted each day went unread at the time due to limited human resources. This MVUEH message appears to have used rotor order “2-5-3,” differing from that day’s standard order of “5-1-2,” which may be why it couldn’t be solved with the usual key candidates. In the thread, some pointed out that “modern ciphers (AES, elliptic-curve cryptography, etc.) are already at an unbreakable level” — but that’s a comment about modern cryptography, which works on an entirely different principle from Enigma, and some responses conflated the two. It’s also worth noting that the AI’s answer isn’t a simple hallucination: it was judged correct after being cross-checked against already-known ciphertexts and confirmed by an independent third-party researcher, Frode Weierud, who runs the cryptography research site “Crypto Cellar Research.”
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Science News+) thread “[AI] “GPT-6 Astra” Cracks 82-Character Enigma Cipher Unsolved for Years, Even Wrote Its Own Decryption Program.”
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