Steve Weis

Software engineer at @anthropicai interested in cryptography, security, privacy, and machine learning.

[Steven Murdoch @sjmurdoch]

For 19 years, GPS satellites have secretly broadcast a “numbers station” in their public signals. We decoded 12M messages: a 2011 flash where 31 of 32 satellites flipped in hours, “ghost” substrings repeating years apart, and a “TEXT” prefix spreading now. https://t.co/xz3svmqiDa

[Dino A. Dai Zovi @dinodaizovi]

This is really good, @AnthropicAI posted a document on how to apply the principles behind Zero Trust to AI Agents:

https://t.co/bli719l9M4

[Steve Weis @sweis]

Project Glasswing is expanding to 150 more organizations. Work is continuing to bring Mythos-level capabilities to GA, including scaling up the Cyber Verification Program and developing better safeguards:
https://t.co/tLuZLrjHsU

[JP Aumasson @veorq]

Gentle as in 'only 182 pages': https://t.co/130H1OJ7Ww
via @jedisct1

[Matthew Botvinick @mattbotvinick]

Anthropic now has a team dedicated to AI and the rule of law — and we've just opened our first role.

@AnthropicAI has studied what AI means for the economy. This team asks a different question: what will it mean for executive power, for courts and elections — and for the public deliberation that constitutional democracy ultimately rests on?

We're looking for someone with real depth in both AI and the law — a legal scholar, political scientist, or experienced government hand who can reason about frontier systems and the institutions they will affect.

If that's you, or someone you know: https://t.co/668HDz1lhf

[Steve Weis @sweis]

https://t.co/VQneV4NZgy

[Steve Weis @sweis]

“State of Post Quantum Cryptography” post by @0xdabbad00 : https://t.co/H1krMKho2Z

[ClaudeDevs @ClaudeDevs]

We’ve shipped a security-guidance plugin for Claude Code that helps identify and fix vulnerabilities as you’re writing code.

Available for all Claude Code users. Install from the plugin marketplace (/plugins).

[Steve Weis @sweis]

https://t.co/DS2YNDvA4I

[Steve Weis @sweis]

@chrisrohlf @AnthropicAI Welcome!

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

[Steve Weis @sweis]

@NumanThabit The point would be to demonstrate a unique quantum computing advantage as a marker of progress, which this doesn't do.

[Steve Weis @sweis]

The problem size is too small for this to be meaningful. I reproduced these results running them against a random number generator instead of a quantum computer.

[Project Eleven @projecteleven]

Project Eleven Awards 1 BTC Q-Day Prize for Largest Quantum Attack on Elliptic Curve Cryptography to Date

Researcher breaks 15-bit ECC key on publicly accessible quantum hardware in a 512x jump from the previous public demonstration.

Project Eleven today awarded the Q-Day Prize, a one Bitcoin bounty, to Giancarlo Lelli for breaking a 15-bit elliptic curve key on a publicly accessible quantum computer. The result is the largest public demonstration to date of the attack class that threatens Bitcoin, Ethereum, and over $2.5 trillion in ECC-secured digital assets.

"The resource requirements for this type of attack keep dropping, and the barrier to running it in practice is dropping with them," said @apruden08, CEO of Project Eleven. "The winning submission came from an independent researcher working on cloud-accessible hardware. No national lab, no private chip. It shows that tangible progress is possible and highlights the urgency to migrate to post-quantum cryptography sooner rather than later. Google just committed to being quantum-secure by 2029. The window to get ahead of this is closing.”

Lelli derived a private key from its public key across a search space of 32,767 using a variant of Shor’s algorithm. Shor's targets the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP), the math underlying the digital signature schemes securing Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most blockchains.

Quantum attacks on ECC have moved from theory to practice over the last seven months. Steve Tippeconnic's 6-bit demonstration in September 2025 was the first public break on quantum hardware. Lelli's 15-bit result extends it by a factor of 512.

Theoretical resource estimates for a full 256-bit attack, the scale Bitcoin operates at, have fallen sharply over the same period. Google's April 2026 whitepaper put the requirement at under 500,000 physical qubits. A subsequent paper from Caltech and Oratomic brought that figure as low as 10,000 qubits in a neutral-atom architecture.

Lelli's result is the practical counterpart to those optimizations. The distance from 15 bits to 256 bits is large, but the gap is increasingly viewed as an engineering problem and not a fundamental physics problem.

Roughly 6.9 million Bitcoin sit in wallets whose public keys are visible on-chain, exposing them to quantum attack. All blockchains using ECC share similar risks with vulnerable assets.

Project Eleven is developing its next challenge, focused on the intersection of frontier AI models and quantum cryptanalysis.

[Steve Weis @sweis]

Nomination for worst recruiter email.

[Steve Weis @sweis]

"[Firefox applied] an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation."
https://t.co/WPWV6SEIJ1

[Steve Weis @sweis]

New Quantum Computing Landscape for 2026 from @sejaques: https://t.co/9BNEtbP32N

[Steve Weis @sweis]

https://t.co/S4vLTGcV9J

[Steve Weis @sweis]

Great write up of how Trail of Bits was able to find vulnerabilities in Google’s zero knowledge prover and generate a fake proof:

https://t.co/1rRCcdQvuY

[Claude @claudeai]

Introducing Claude Opus 4.7, our most capable Opus model yet.

It handles long-running tasks with more rigor, follows instructions more precisely, and verifies its own outputs before reporting back.

You can hand off your hardest work with less supervision.

[Steve Weis @sweis]

Michael O. Rabin, Turing Award winner of Miller-Rabin fame, died this week:
https://t.co/pRR0EA3YoE