Can AI break encryption? OpenAI’s new math has cryptographers divided

Last week OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, dropped 722 mathematical manuscripts online in one go, every one of them penned by an artificial intelligence model unavailable to the public. The output was far from perfect: OpenAI withdrew three of the papers within a day, and mathematicians are still poring over the rest. But the scale of the research, and the incisiveness of its insights, has some worried.

Math powers cryptography. Every text you send and every bank log-in you submit is protected by a math problem that’s supposedly impossible to crack. The system rests on the assumption that no one will figure out how. And AI just showed it’s pretty good at math.

That worries Matthew Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University. In a social media post a few days after OpenAI’s massive math release, he suggested there was a 15 percent chance that we could lose confidence in existing public-key encryption algorithms—which allow computers to establish secure connections and verify digital identities without first exchanging a shared secret key.

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