Can AI Break Cryptography? What the Experts Actually Think

All of a sudden, a new threat emerged in the world of cryptography, which is whether our AI friends can actually attack crypto systems that we thought were secure.

The fear here is that the AI labs could break them if they are breakable.

The fact that people try to break them and fail gives us more confidence. NIST is already standardizing many other types of public key systems that we can switch to, so if it turns out one of our assumptions is broken, we have backups. We just need to know.

Are there startup opportunities here and where a new company might be able to come in and help?

AI is getting better at solving difficult math problems. Could it eventually break the cryptography protecting our banking systems, private messages, and crypto wallets? Recent results from OpenAI have sparked new concerns about the security of modern cryptography. In this episode, a16z crypto's Liz Harkavy is joined by Stanford professor Dan Boneh, general partner Eddie Lazarin, and research partner Justin Thaler to separate fact from speculation. They discuss what the recent breakthroughs actually tell us, how AI threats differ from quantum computing, and why there's no reason to panic today. They also explained how AI could ultimately help make cryptography and software more secure.

Hey, welcome to our, our show today. I'm Liz. I'm joined here with Dan Boneh, a professor at Stanford, um, and Eddie Lazarin and Justin Thaler, two members of our team here at a16z. Um, we're here to, uh, talk about a, a pretty big discussion that's going on right now that's been kicked off yesterday by a tweet that a security researcher, Justin Drake, put out warning the crypto industry to start preparing for what he's calling bunker mode, um, specifically around this worry that the advances in AI are gonna cause a breakthrough or breaking of cryptography faster even than of a quantum computer might, which is normally the basis of the discussion that we have when we think about modern-day cryptography and, and what the state-of-the-art looks like. Um, and so he called on, you know, big institutions to start thinking about moving funds and start thinking about this, um, and a lot of that has been kicked off by some papers that OpenAI put out and different kind of innov-- uh, breakthroughs they had in mathematical problems that were previously unsolved and how that relates back to cryptography. And so, Dan, I don't know if you wanna kinda summarize what those breakthroughs were or what those papers put out and how that kind of kicked this off.

So let's see. I guess the first thing I should say is, uh, you know, everybody calm down. Don't panic. Calm down. The world today is the same as it was a year, a year ago, two years ago. Um, that's the first message. Now, I guess before we get started, I just wanna make sure people are on the same page in that there are kind of two stories that are getting entangled, and m-- let's-- I think we should first disentangle them. There is this long, uh, going, long-going conversation on the threat of quantum computing to cryptography. This is not what this is about. Here, there's all of a sudden a new threat that's kind of emerged, uh, in the wor-world