I see it as: they're all trying really hard problems that aren't in the training data, to gauge if their models are improving, achieved by looking at problem that humans haven't been able to solve yet. The evidence to this is all the problems being publicized in the last few weeks.

This effort is relevant to "breaking cryptography" about as much as publishing the script for a 40 years old movie would break the film industry.

If it was insecure and they found it first, that'd be better than many alternative actors who would eventually find the same exploit.

Owning all cryptocurrency, and really all financial transactions over the internet, might briefly justify the Anthropic valuation

We should be certain that the crypto algos we use are secure. It would be a great use of their resources to try to break crypto.

The models are really good at cryptography.

Remember when OpenAI published 700 math break throughs and absolutely none involved cryptography?

As are all companies working in quantum computing.

Yeah, happy to see. Wouldn't it be cool if the many computational hardness assumptions were no longer just assumptions? If the algorithms and implementations used would no longer require the holy blessings of arbitrary - if credentialed - researchers?

Or consider the algorithmic complexity classes underpinning all of this, not just P vs NP, but also whether quantum computers are actually a distinct class, since that is not proven yet either afaik. The reason we're moving to quantum resistant algos in the first place.

Um, we all are. Do you not want people routinely testing the locks that guard your home against attacks enabled by the latest technologies?

Eh, I hate Anthropic too, but this seems pretty tame. Lots of people have wanted to know the origin of those seeds even though they thought there was no back door.