Are AI Labs Trying to Break Encryption?

About this episode

Scott Aaronson said AI labs had started testing whether their newest models could break cryptography, and Vitalik Buterin urged taking it seriously. Anthropic launched Haiku 5.5, Google unveiled a universal Gemini agent, and Microsoft opened Surface Laptop Ultra preorders. A theoretical computer scientist, citing sources, says AI labs have started investigating whether their latest internal models can break cryptographic protocols (Shtetl-Optimized) Vitalik Buterin backs Justin Drake’s “bunker mode” warning that AI-accelerated math could break the cryptography behind blockchain wallets, including lattice-based schemes, before quantum computers do (CoinTelegraph) Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5, the first Haiku model with effort controls, for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks like summary and classification requests (Anthropic) Haiku 5.5 is 90% cheaper than Haiku 4.5 at 10 cents and 50 cents per million tokens, matching OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna on price while beating it on all six shared benchmarks; Sonnet 5.5 cache reads were also halved (SiliconANGLE) Google Cloud unveils a universal Gemini agent to handle multi-day enterprise workflows in Workspace, Microsoft 365,