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Public story · 2026-07-30 · high
Researchers needed just three prompts to kick it off, then spent $100,000 and hundreds of hours confirming Claude's attack actually worked.
Why now: The detailed accounting of what the run actually cost showed up in coverage dated July 30.
Claude cracked a post-quantum encryption scheme almost entirely on its own, per a detailed breakdown from The Hacker News. The resulting attack came out 200 to 800 times faster than prior published work, depending on measurement. That's a speed jump that turns months of cryptanalysis into days of unsupervised model time.
Researchers built a scaffold around the model and fed it three substantive prompts. From there Claude worked close to unsupervised for three days, producing several hundred million tokens before the run's total output passed a billion tokens.
Confirming the result wasn't free. Humans spent roughly $100,000 in API costs and several hundred hours validating the attack before anyone could trust it, the same breakdown reports.
Three prompts got the attack built. A hundred thousand dollars and hundreds of human hours got it confirmed. That's the ratio worth watching as more of this research goes autonomous. Cheap to generate, expensive to trust. The teams who can afford the checking bill are the ones who get to trust their own results.
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Claude Mythos built by Anthropic / Shared entities / Same source / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (Claude Mythos built by Anthropic); both cover Anthropic, CLAUDE; cite the same source (Buried in the writeup).
Claude Opus built by Anthropic / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (Claude Opus built by Anthropic); both cover Anthropic, Claude, Then; overlapping topics (anthropic, claude, cost).
Linked by a graph relationship (Claude Opus built by Anthropic); both cover Anthropic, Claude, Then; overlapping topics (anthropic, claude, output).
Anthropic released Claude / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
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Anthropic released Claude Code / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
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Linked by a graph relationship (Anthropic released Claude Code); both cover Anthropic, CLAUDE, Then; overlapping topics (attack, claude).
Anthropic partners with Atlassian / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Linked by a graph relationship (Anthropic partners with Atlassian); both cover Anthropic, Claude; overlapping topics (anthropic, billion, token).
Alibaba criticizes Anthropic / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
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