Astra and Opus just passed Turing’s other test

Computer pioneer Alan Turing is best known for his eponymous experiment to test whether artificial and human intelligence can be distinguished. However, the more important test he faced during his lifetime was cracking the Enigma code used by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Now, a pair of cryptanalysts say they’ve cracked two long-unsolved messages encoded by Enigma machines using LLMs built by OpenAI and Anthropic.

While Turing and his team of cryptanalysts built an early computer, dubbed the Bombe , that allowed the United Kingdom to translate Enigma messages during the war, a handful of archival messages remain unbroken – usually due to mistranscription or errors by the original encoders.