Astra and Opus just passed Turing’s other test
Frontier AI models are finishing Alan Turing's World War II codebreaking work.
Alan Turing's legacy extends beyond his eponymous test for artificial and human intelligence. During World War II, he cracked the Enigma code used by Nazi Germany. Recently, two cryptanalysts have cracked two long-unsolved messages encoded by Enigma machines using large language models (LLMs) built by OpenAI and Anthropic. While Turing and his team created an early computer called the Bombe to decipher Enigma messages during the war, some archival messages remain unbroken due to transcription errors or encoder mistakes.
Carter Leffen, a developer, asked OpenAI's newest model, Astra, to search for an unbroken message and decode it. After conducting its own research, Astra found context clues, built a simulator of the Enigma machine, and recovered the plaintext of a message that had baffled researchers since 2005. Frode Weirerud, a retired electrical engineer, validated Leffen's solution, expressing awe at the AI's capabilities.
Another cryptanalyst, Jack Willis, used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 model to break a different unsolved message. Both models demonstrated professional cryptanalytic and archival research skills, solving problems that would take human researchers weeks or months. Only seven Enigma messages remain unbroken, along with one message with a known plaintext but an unbroken code.
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