Quoting Matthew Green
- ID
- 8843
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 01 Oct 2026, 2:29 PM
- Fetched
- 01 Oct 2026, 2:55 PM
- Provider
- Simon Willison
- Category
- developer-ai
- Original URL
- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/1/matthew-green/
- Source URL
- https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/
Summary
- Score
- 4.0
- Created
- 01 Oct 2026, 2:56 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learners
What happened
Simon Willison quotes cryptographer Matthew Green reacting to Anthropic's recent cryptography work. Green argues the field is mid-transition from EC and RSA public-key algorithms to post-quantum schemes built on newer hard problems — hence the number of standards under consideration such as HAWK — and that this makes it an unusually good moment for AI to get good at cryptanalysis. In the best case, he says, AI failing to break these problems gives real confidence in them and makes the cryptanalysis literature more robust.
Why it matters
There is no Malaysia or Southeast Asia angle in this text, and no detail about what Anthropic actually did or published — it is a single quoted opinion. The one concrete decision-relevant point for builders is the migration context Green names: if you have a post-quantum migration on your roadmap (EC/RSA to newer schemes), his argument is that AI-assisted cryptanalysis during this window is more likely to validate the new problems than to break them, so the standards churn around candidates like HAWK is expected rather than alarming. Treat the 'Anthropic cryptography work' claim as unverified from this item alone.
Discussion angle
Green's framing inverts the usual AI-breaks-crypto fear: should teams treat AI cryptanalysis as a threat to post-quantum candidates like HAWK, or as free adversarial review that hardens the standards before migration deadlines hit?