Claude reconstructs P-256 public seed, per report, leaving provenance gaps

Anthropic's Claude model has been used to reconstruct the public seed for P-256, the elliptic curve that underpins passkey authentication and is increasingly targeted by on-chain signature verification work, according to a report from CryptoSlate.

The report describes a timestamp-based "recipe" that regenerates the seed value, which the outlet frames as adding provenance evidence for the curve — a way of showing how the starting value could have been derived rather than asserting it was chosen arbitrarily.

What the method does not settle

According to CryptoSlate, the selection criteria used for P-256's parameters and the origins of its base point remain unexplained. That leaves the central question in the report — the nature of the curve's design choices — only partially addressed by the seed reconstruction.

P-256, also known as secp256r1, is a NIST-standard curve widely deployed in hardware security keys and the WebAuthn/passkey stack. Ethereum's native signature scheme is secp256k1, but developers have proposed adding a P-256 verification precompile so smart accounts can validate signatures produced by phones and secure enclaves, which is why the curve's trust assumptions draw attention from wallet builders.

Questions about how standard elliptic curves were parameterised have circulated since the Dual_EC_DRBG episode, and research of this kind is best read as a provenance discussion rather than a change to any deployed system. The reported work does not alter P-256 itself or Ethereum's consensus rules.