Executive Summary
Anthropic says Claude Mythos Preview helped derive a key-recovery attack on post-quantum test scheme HAWK-256 and a 200-800x speedup on a 7-round AES-128 attack.
What Happened
Anthropic says Claude Mythos Preview helped derive an end-to-end key-recovery attack against HAWK-256 and a 200- to 800-fold speedup for an attack on seven-round AES-128. The HAWK attack exploits a previously unused symmetry in the lattice behind the signature scheme. Anthropic's released implementation gives an expected end-to-end runtime of about three hours and 42 minutes on a 96-core server
Affected Products
- HAWK-256
- AES-128 (reduced round)
Vulnerability / Attack Technique
AI-assisted cryptanalysis (research)
Technical Mechanism
As reported, the model found an unused symmetry in the scheme.
AI Security Category
AI-assisted attack
Part of the AI-Assisted Attacks topic.
RealGround Analysis
AI is now contributing to cryptanalysis research. Full AES is not affected.
Recommended Controls
- No action required
Related RealGround Service
AI Agent SBOM and LLM Mapping · or start with the free AI Agent Security Scanner.
Sources
thehackernews.com: https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/claude-ai-just-cracked-post-quantum.html
Summary and analysis written by RealGround from the source above; last updated 2026-10-18.