Conor Deegan, co-founder of Project Eleven, said on October 19, 2026 that artificial intelligence models have discovered exploitable mathematical flaws in two post-quantum cryptographic schemes: HAWK and Classic McEliece. Anthropic’s AI model Claude Mythos identified a key-recovery attack on HAWK, reducing its effective security level from 2^150 to 2^108, leading to the scheme’s withdrawal from the NIST standardization process in July 2026. For Classic McEliece, recent analyses have estimated key-recovery complexity as low as 2^94 operations, prompting Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) to advise against its deployment in early October 2026. No production systems have been compromised. Project Eleven responded by launching Strongpoint, a custody platform using hybrid classical and post-quantum signatures with modular algorithm integration.
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