Anthropic's Frontier Red Team reported on October 16 that an internal Claude research model traced the origins of the NIST elliptic-curve seeds — values the NSA supplied in 2000 with no explanation of how they were generated — to the C library's lrand48 random-number generator seeded with Unix timestamps from the 1990s.

Claude reportedly identified the source of the five prime-curve seeds (P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521) in under half an hour, working bit by bit through the published values and testing adjacent chunks as consecutive outputs of a period-era generator — and without being given the long-standing tip that the seeds might be the hash of a humorous passphrase. The provenance question had been open for more than two decades.

Anthropic stresses this is not a cryptographic break and requires no change to how ECDSA is used. Several related curve parameters remain unexplained, so the result answers where the prime-curve seeds came from without settling every question around the standards.