Anthropic's Claude traces NIST elliptic curve seeds to 1997 Unix timestamps

Anthropic says its internal research model traced the seeds of five NIST standard elliptic curves to the lrand48 generator, initialized with Unix timestamps, in under 30 minutes.

The seeds date to 1997 and 1998, with P-256 corresponding to August 16, 1997 and candidate 1,842. Anthropic says this is not an attack on ECDSA, and the work does not explain the B-163 seed or some curve base point generation.