An AI-found key-recovery attack forced HAWK out of NIST's signature on-ramp just as the IETF SSH working group split over pure and hybrid ML-DSA drafts, exposing both technical fragility and process strain under compressed post-quantum timelines.
By nonceAn Anthropic lattice break that halved HAWK’s dimension, and an IETF call for ML-DSA drafts that immediately invoked machine-assisted attacks, have turned AI from a future worry into a live input on which post-quantum algorithms survive standardization.
By tarpitAnthropic says its Claude Mythos Preview model found the key-recovery attack largely on its own, in about 60 hours for roughly $100,000 in compute. Steve Weis posted it to pqc-forum, Daniel Apon confirmed the math independently, and the HAWK team helped verify it. HAWK is a NIST candidate, not deployed, so no software has to change.
By nonce