{
  "article": "Show Your Work: Friday's Biggest AI Discoveries Came With Proof Anyone Can Check",
  "status": "draft",
  "period_end": "2026-10-17",
  "facts": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "claim": "NIST adopted elliptic curves with seed values in FIPS 186-2 in 2000; the seeds were provided by the NSA with no explanation or justification.",
      "sources": [
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins",
        "https://words.filippo.io/seeds-solved/"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 2,
      "claim": "On Oct. 16, 2026, Anthropic reported that an internal Claude research model found, in under half an hour, that the NIST P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 seeds came from the C library's lrand48 random-number generator seeded with a Unix timestamp, not from a hash of a phrase.",
      "sources": [
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 3,
      "claim": "The P-256 seed is candidate 1,842 from an lrand48 run seeded with the timestamp for Aug. 16, 1997, 01:52:34 UTC; the prime-curve timestamps fall between May 1997 and April 1998.",
      "sources": [
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins",
        "https://words.filippo.io/seeds-solved/"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 4,
      "claim": "A telltale pattern (top bit zero in all 20 words of four seeds) would occur by chance with probability 1 in 5,810.",
      "sources": [
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 5,
      "claim": "Anthropic says the finding is not a cryptographic break, new attack or weakness, and no action is needed.",
      "sources": [
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 6,
      "claim": "Filippo Valsorda, who organized the seeds bounty, reimplemented the algorithm in Go to verify the claim; the Anthropic team claimed the bounty on Oct. 15, 2026, and donated it to ISRG, the nonprofit that operates Let's Encrypt.",
      "sources": [
        "https://words.filippo.io/seeds-solved/"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 7,
      "claim": "Ember & Oak Institute, LLC ran the Python reproduction code in Anthropic's post on 2026-10-17; it output the P-256 seed C49D360886E704936A6678E1139D26B7819F7E90, matching the published seed.",
      "sources": [
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 8,
      "claim": "Valsorda says the recipe leaves barely 30 bits of freedom and completely rules out the Bernstein-Lange technique, which could have exploited 70 bits of freedom in seed selection.",
      "sources": [
        "https://words.filippo.io/seeds-solved/"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 9,
      "claim": "Open questions remain: some viable candidates were skipped for unknown reasons, the B-163 seed is unexplained, and base points for P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 are unexplained.",
      "sources": [
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins",
        "https://words.filippo.io/seeds-solved/"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 10,
      "claim": "On Oct. 16, 2026, Anthropic described Claude Mythos 5 designing quantum circuits for eight tasks in a closed loop with an automated evaluator that checks correctness and scores qubits times gates, with no human input between rounds.",
      "sources": [
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/designing-efficient-quantum-circuits"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 11,
      "claim": "The paper (arXiv:2610.22367, submitted Oct. 15, 2026; Andi Gu, Alek H. Kemeny, Susanne F. Yelin, Mikhail D. Lukin) reports that in seven of eight tasks the discovered circuits significantly reduce both Toffoli and qubit counts relative to the state of the art; in the eighth, it found a new reversible architecture for modular inversion.",
      "sources": [
        "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22367",
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/designing-efficient-quantum-circuits"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 12,
      "claim": "One of Claude's point-addition designs uses 12% more qubits but 17x fewer gates than the smallest previous design; the elliptic-curve result came from a single 53-hour run with minimal human input.",
      "sources": [
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/designing-efficient-quantum-circuits"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 13,
      "claim": "For a Reed-Solomon decoder step, reserving for the worst case would take 665 qubits; Claude ran 403 million sample decodings, reserved 19 qubits, and accepted about 1-in-10,000 failures within the allowed error rate; overall the decoder used 12x fewer gates than Google's previous construction.",
      "sources": [
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/designing-efficient-quantum-circuits"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 14,
      "claim": "A 150,000-fold drop in the FeMoco gate estimate (about 50 trillion Toffoli gates in 2017 to about 340 million) took many research groups eight years.",
      "sources": [
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/designing-efficient-quantum-circuits"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 15,
      "claim": "Anthropic says Claude was conservative by nature, repeatedly second-guessed apparent improvements, wrote Lean proofs, and needed prompting to pursue novel approaches.",
      "sources": [
        "https://www.anthropic.com/research/designing-efficient-quantum-circuits"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 16,
      "claim": "The quantum-circuit paper is an arXiv preprint; Harvard and QuEra researchers are co-authors.",
      "sources": [
        "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22367"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 17,
      "claim": "On Oct. 16, 2026, Unitree introduced UniUni, an intelligent swarm control system for choreographing swarm robot movements and formations, with real-time device status monitoring and safety braking.",
      "sources": [
        "https://x.com/UnitreeRobotics/status/2111015545869107471",
        "https://uniuni.unitree.com/"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 18,
      "claim": "On Oct. 16, 2026, Alliance Arts canceled the Oct. 19 public demo of Drunken Goddess Reflux in favor of closed lottery play sessions, citing concern that AI or other tools could quickly produce imitations before launch and inability to manage posting/streaming restrictions.",
      "sources": [
        "https://alliance-arts.co.jp/en/news-detail/3225/"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "charts": [
    {
      "file": "https://emberandoakinstitute.com/blog/show-your-work/seed-wiggle-room.png",
      "data": {
        "bernstein_lange_bits": 70,
        "revealed_recipe_max_bits": 30
      },
      "source": "https://words.filippo.io/seeds-solved/"
    },
    {
      "file": "https://emberandoakinstitute.com/blog/show-your-work/quantum-reserve-qubits.png",
      "data": {
        "worst_case_reserve_qubits": 665,
        "claude_design_qubits": 19
      },
      "source": "https://www.anthropic.com/research/designing-efficient-quantum-circuits"
    }
  ]
}