Cryptographers who develop encryption technologies may not be sleeping very well these days.

OpenAI and Anthropic both said Monday that their internal AI models had disproven the Exponential Time Hypothesis , a longstanding computer science theorem that predicts the minimum difficulty of solving a certain category of problems. Cryptographers had long assumed the hypothesis was true, and built other findings on the basis of that assumption.

Disproving the Exponential Time Hypothesis won’t endanger any current encryption methods, said Matthew Green , professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University and founder of encryption startup Zeutro .…