Carter Leffen couldn't believe his eyes when the artificial-intelligence model GPT-6 Astra decoded a secret German army message that had been encrypted for 85 years. Leffen, who has no cryptography experience, asked the model to decipher the message, nudged it a few times to keep thinking and encouraged it to keep working when he went to bed. Sure enough, when he woke up in the morning, it had a solution. Leffen is one of many non-experts who are now using large language models (LLMs) to break historical codes. Their efforts harness the LLMs' ability to rapidly deploy decryption algorithms while also searching the Internet for extra historical documents or information that might help. Cryptography specialists are thrilled at the surge in interest in codebreaking ' but they are also being overwhelmed by a deluge of requests to validate AI solutions, which can often be incorrect. 'There are so many false positives that are coming in from people who don't really understand cryptanalysis,' says Elonka Dunin, a retired game developer in the Washington DC area who has written books on cryptography....
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