Anthropic Says Claude Traced NIST ECDSA Curve Seeds to 1990s RNG

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team reported that an internal Claude research model traced the NIST ECDSA curve seeds to the C library's lrand48 generator seeded with Unix timestamps from 1997–1998. The provenance question had been open since NIST adopted the seeds from the NSA without explanation in FIPS 186-2 in 2000.

• P-192, P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521 seeds are lrand48 outputs, not a passphrase hash
• The published P-256 seed was candidate 1842 of the generator run
• Initializations were Unix timestamps between May 1997 and April 1998
• Anthropic says the finding is not a break or weakness in ECDSA