[Digital Today reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Anthropic’s AI model Mythos found a fundamental weakness in HAWK, a post-quantum cryptography (PQC) candidate algorithm, Ars Technica reported on July 29 local time.

After the finding was confirmed, developers voluntarily withdrew HAWK from the NIST standardisation process.

The report said the attack does not pose an immediate risk to existing cryptosystems, but shows AI is taking an increasingly important role in cryptography research. HAWK is a digital signature algorithm that NIST had been evaluating as a next-generation post-quantum resistant standard candidate. It had already passed two rounds of evaluation, and a third-stage review to find subtle vulnerabilities was under way.

Mythos improved on existing attack methods for HAWK and cut the effective key strength in half.

As a result, the algorithm no longer met the required security level, and the developers withdrew it from the standardisation process.

Mythos did not create a new mathematical method. Instead, it combined existing cryptographic techniques in ways researchers had not tried. Matthew Green (매튜 그린), a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, assessed this as particularly noteworthy. He said AI did not produce a new theory but achieved results by combining familiar tools in unexpected ways.

Anthropic stressed the result does not mean current cryptographic standards have been broken. It said the finding was verified using a specially prepared test version for research purposes, and the attack itself requires enormous computing power, making it impossible to carry out outside a laboratory. Even so, it said it views the result as a sign that large language models are rapidly advancing in codebreaking capability.