ChatGPT-6 Astra cracks 85-year-old 1941 Enigma-coded message in two days
- ID
- 28872
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 26 Sep 2026, 6:00 PM
- Fetched
- 26 Sep 2026, 7:09 PM
- Provider
- Tom's Hardware
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-6-astra-cracks-1941-enigma-coded-message-in-two-days-autonomous-ai-coded-its-own-simulator-to-crack-code-that-was-unsolved-since-it-was-shared-online-back-in-2005
- Source URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/all
Summary
- Score
- 3.0
- Created
- 26 Sep 2026, 7:09 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnersai_agent_usersvibe_coders
What happened
Tom's Hardware ran a headline claiming that "ChatGPT-6 Astra" cracked an 85-year-old Enigma-encoded message from 1941 in two days, reportedly writing its own simulator to do it — a ciphertext said to have gone unsolved since it was shared online in 2005. The supplied article text contains only page navigation, membership prompts, and newsletter sign-up boilerplate, with no method, model access details, cost, token counts, or independent verification. No community discussion numbers or technical reproduction steps are given.
Why it matters
There is nothing here a builder can act on: no reproducible simulator code, no ciphertext, no timing or cost breakdown, and no third-party check of the claim, so treating it as evidence of current agent capability would be guessing. The one transferable lesson is about evaluating agentic claims generally — when a capability story ships as a headline with no artifact, wait for the code or a replication before changing how you scope agent work. No Malaysian or Southeast Asian angle is present in this text.
Discussion angle
What would it take to trust a claim like this — if an agent writes its own Enigma simulator, what artifacts (source, ciphertext, runtime, cost, independent rerun) would you require before citing it as a capability benchmark, and how does that checklist apply to agent demos you see from vendors this month?