🔧 When a Model Finds a Bug in Cryptography, and a Cryptographer Learns New Mathematics from It

This essay is an answer to the critic who demands: "Stop telling fairy tales about AI helping science. Show me the receipts." Fair enough. Without receipts, stories of AI's triumphant triumphs sound like cult literature.

In February 2026, Google posted a 151-page preprint on arXiv. Fifty authors from Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, MIT, EPFL, and a...