Project Eleven co-founder warns AI is finding cracks in post-quantum cryptography

The cryptography designed to protect us from quantum computers just ran into a different kind of machine. According to Conor Deegan, co-founder of Project Eleven, AI models have found exploitable mathematical flaws in two post-quantum schemes: HAWK and Classic McEliece. No quantum computer was required. The weaknesses were in the math itself, and AI spotted them. Deegan made the comments on October 19, 2026. The timing matters because the industry has spent years preparing for a quantum threat. Now it may have to plan for a much faster cryptanalyst that is already here. What happened to HAWK and McEliece Start with HAWK, a digital signature scheme that was competing in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) post-quantum signature standardization round. In July 2026, Anthropic’s AI model, Claude Mythos, reportedly discovered a symmetry-based key-recovery attack on the scheme. A key-recovery attack is the worst kind. It means an attacker can work backward to the secret key, not just forge a single message. The research findings describe the attack as halving HAWK’s effective security levels. For HAWK-512, effective security dropped from 2^150 to 2^108 under the a...