OpenAI's Astra and Anthropic's Opus LLMs Decipher Unsolved Enigma Messages

LLMs Crack Historic Enigma Codes

Two large language models, OpenAI's Astra and Anthropic's Claude Opus 5, have successfully deciphered two distinct Enigma messages that had remained unsolved for decades. This achievement highlights the advanced capabilities of current LLMs in complex problem-solving and historical cryptanalysis.

Astra's Independent Research

Developer Carter Leffen tasked OpenAI's Astra with decoding an unbroken Enigma message from a database. Astra conducted its own archival research, identified context clues, and constructed an Enigma machine simulator to recover the plaintext of a message that had eluded researchers since 2005. Cryptologist Frode Weierud later validated Astra's solution, expressing awe at its speed and accuracy.

Opus Deciphers Another Message

Separately, cryptanalyst Jack Willis used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 model to break a different unsolved Enigma message. Willis provided more specific guidance to Claude, which then utilized the known signature of an officer's name to successfully decode the message. This demonstrates the models' ability to work with varying levels of human input to achieve complex results.

Implications for Cryptanalysis and AI

The successful decoding of these messages by LLMs suggests a significant advancement in AI's capacity for tasks requiring deep contextual understanding, pattern recognition, and simulated reasoning. The speed at which Astra performed its research, completing tasks that would take human researchers weeks or months in just days, indicates a potential shift in how historical and complex cryptographic problems can be approached.