Tech News

Tech News · 2026-08-01

Claude found a cryptographic weakness in a NIST post-quantum candidate that survived two years of expert review, evidence that model capability is starting to outpace the process meant to check it.

4 min read2026-08-01

Cryptography

Anthropic's Claude Mythos cuts HAWK-256 key recovery to 2^38 operations¹

Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview took about 60 hours to find a previously unused symmetry in HAWK-256, a NIST post-quantum cipher candidate that had already cleared two rounds of expert review, cutting the cost of full key recovery from 2^64 to 2^38 operations.¹ Separately, after first refusing the task as impossible, the model spent three days and roughly a billion output tokens building a technique it named the Möbius Bridge. That technique improved the best known attack on seven-round (not full) AES-128 by 200 to 800 times, at a cost of about $100,000 in API usage per result.¹ Neither attack touches software running today, Anthropic says, but for NIST's reviewers weighing HAWK's candidacy the finding means doubling the cipher's key sizes to compensate would erase much of what made it an attractive post-quantum standard in the first place.²

AI Models

Moonshot ships Kimi K3's 2.8-trillion-parameter weights³

Moonshot's model card puts Kimi K3 at 2.8 trillion total parameters and 104 billion active per token across 16 of 896 routed experts, the largest openly released mixture-of-experts model to date.³ That is up from the 2.7 trillion Fortune reported at the July 16 closed launch, fixed only when the weights actually shipped on July 27.⁴ The model understands text, image, and video natively, with a 1,048,576-token context window.³ The "Kimi K3 License" behind those weights is not MIT or Apache: any Model-as-a-Service business earning more than $20 million a year must sign a separate commercial agreement with Moonshot.³ At $15 per million output tokens against Anthropic Fable's $50, and with Moonshot's own unverified benchmarks claiming wins over Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6, a developer choosing which model to call now has an open-weight option undercutting both on price.⁴

Quantum Computing

HRL runs quantum error correction entirely from a chip at 4 kelvin⁵

HRL's exchange-only quantum processor packs 54 coupled quantum dots into a three-rail array configurable to 18 qubits.⁵ Single- and two-qubit operations on it advance the exchange-only state of the art by an order of magnitude, the team reports in a paper published in Nature the week of July 29.⁵ Running a distance-5 repetition code against simulation, errors fell roughly fivefold as more qubits joined the code, and the correction ran entirely under a cryogenic controller at about 4 kelvin with no real-time input from room-temperature electronics, reportedly for the first time.⁶ That targets the wiring bottleneck that has kept silicon quantum processors from scaling past a few dozen qubits. Control logic living on a chip beside the qubits, instead of racks of room-temperature electronics feeding thousands of wires into the cryostat, is what a fault-tolerant machine actually needs.⁵

Health

Deramiocel cuts Duchenne muscular dystrophy decline by 54%⁷

The Phase 3 trial randomized 106 patients ages 10 to 22, double-blind and placebo-controlled.⁷ Deramiocel, an infused, donor-derived cardiac cell therapy given quarterly for a year, slowed decline on the PUL 2.0 upper-limb function scale by 54% relative to placebo.⁷ Among the 64 participants with pre-existing cardiac involvement, the treated group's heart function held up better than placebo's, and among 22 with comparable imaging, the drug slowed the buildup of scar tissue in heart muscle, the two complications that most often kill patients with the disease.⁷ The trial enrolled a largely non-ambulatory population with advanced disease that most Duchenne trials exclude.⁸ It lands three weeks before deramiocel's Biologics License Application reaches its August 22 FDA target action date, against a safety profile that included allergic-type infusion reactions in 42% of the treated group versus 15% on placebo.⁷

Anthropic's Claude Mythos cuts HAWK-256 key recovery to 2^38 operations1

Moonshot ships Kimi K3's 2.8-trillion-parameter weights3

HRL runs quantum error correction entirely from a chip at 4 kelvin5

Deramiocel cuts Duchenne muscular dystrophy decline by 54%7

Sources

Anthropic's Claude Mythos cuts HAWK-256 key recovery to 2^38 operations¹

Moonshot ships Kimi K3's 2.8-trillion-parameter weights³

HRL runs quantum error correction entirely from a chip at 4 kelvin⁵

Deramiocel cuts Duchenne muscular dystrophy decline by 54%⁷