Steve Weis factors RSA-896 using Anthropic’s Claude AI

Researcher Steve Weis has successfully factored the RSA-896 semiprime, a 270-decimal-digit number, using assistance from Anthropic’s Claude AI model. This achievement moves the public factoring record from 862 bits to 896 bits.

The process utilized the General Number Field Sieve (GNFS) algorithm, optimized through AI to orchestrate computations across GPU infrastructure. This follows a recent record set by Eric Lu of Cognition, who used the Devin AI agent to factor RSA-260. The rapid succession of these breakthroughs suggests that AI assistance is significantly compressing the timelines for large-number factoring tasks that previously took years.

While these developments demonstrate the power of AI-optimized classical computing, experts note that they do not currently compromise the widely deployed RSA-2048 encryption standard. However, the results suggest that RSA-1024 keys may be vulnerable to organizations possessing data-center-scale GPU resources.