# Claude traces NIST's ECDSA curve seeds to 1990s timestamps

> Source: <https://runtimewire.com/article/claude-traces-nist-ecdsa-seeds-to-timestamps>
> Published: 2026-10-16 20:01:24+00:00

# Claude traces NIST's ECDSA curve seeds to 1990s timestamps

**Anthropic says Claude identified the generator behind five prime-curve seeds, while several curve parameters remain unexplained.**

        By [Ryan Merket](https://runtimewire.com/author/ryan-merket)
        · Published 

Primary source: [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins)

## Why it matters

Claude's work turns a decades-old provenance question into a reproducible result, while the skipped candidates and unexplained curve parameters show what the discovery does not settle.

[Anthropic researchers say Claude traced the origins of five NIST elliptic-curve seeds](https://www.anthropic.com/research/ecdsa-curve-origins) to a 1990s C-library random-number generator initialized with Unix timestamps. The result, published October 16th, addresses a longstanding question about values supplied by the NSA without an explanation of how they were generated. Anthropic says the discovery is not a cryptographic break and requires no change to how ECDSA is used.…