AI agents broke a 35-year-old challenge built to test encryption.
Eric Lu, an engineer at the AI firm Cognition, used its Devin coding agents to crack RSA-260. The agents rewrote the maths software for graphics chips, cutting the cost to about $400,000. That is ten times cheaper than the old record, but modern 2048-bit keys stay safe.
Why it mattersYour bank and browser rely on numbers far bigger than this one, so nothing you use broke today. The news is the price, because weeks of specialist engineering now cost about as much as a car.
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