We broke 92% of SHA-256 – you should start to migrate from it

The "Intermediate Report" [1] lists the authors as "Robert V. and Claude (Anthropic)". Is there any reason to believe this is not AI hallucinations?

[1] https://stateofutopia.com/papers/2/intermediate-report.pdf

The neat thing about bitcoin is that the incentive to break it is so high that it would almost certainly be the first place you would learn that SHA2 had been broken. Not on a website like this. I can verify its integrity by opening robinhood on my phone.

> Secure hash functions are used to make a short version of a large file. Ideally, it has several properties including making it infeasible to find two files with the same cryptographic hash. We've just gotten 92% of the way there. This has security ramifications in that other researchers are expected to be able to complete the work through similar methods as explored in the paper. We weren't sure if this was a remarkable result, since it's not a full collision

I thought this meant they were able to generate collisions for 92% of files/hashes they tried, but it sounds like they're able to generate hashes that are 92% identical?

I'd expect a finding / paper like this to be submitted to the IACR ePrint server [1] to bring it to the attention of the cryptographic community. I can't see that it's been submitted yet.

Venue should not imply credibility but in this case it would certainly help bring the proper scrutiny.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/

Are you sure you asked enough times for money on the website? I only counted 5 instances, not counting the AI-produced PDF doc.

Is this real? The website does not look credible.

For a shorter executive summary, what does "broke" mean here? Can you reliably produce collisions now for 92% of SHA-256 digests?

Their homepage states this is some sort of "AI-governed nation" https://stateofutopia.com/

From https://stateofutopia.com/papers/2/intermediate-report.pdf

> his report was generated on 2026-03-22 as the final artifact of the SHA-256 Cryptanalysis Research Project. Collaboration: Robert V. (research direction, strategy) and Claude/Anthropic (implementation, computation).

This Claude guy is pretty prolific it seems.

But I'll wait for some known cryptographers to chime in

> it is possible that we'll find relations that carry across the entire double-SHA-256 pipeline

Bitcoin mining is a partial second preimage of 0x00 though, not a collision, that statement just seems to be so outside the realm of what they’re claiming to have done. Even MD5, the most widely known to be broken hash, would be secure when used in the same way bitcoin uses SHA256 (other than being too short now, bitcoin miners have done 80 bits of work at this point many times over).

At this point we need AI filtering out the slop being constantly submitted to HN.

Hey Claude,

Do some research and write a paper about breaking Bitcoin.

Seems more like a case study in AI psychosis

I'm skeptical.

S-tier schizoposting

ROFL

In the linked work, we've broken 92% of SHA-256 across its full 64 rounds, and were encouraged to publish it by the leading cryptographer in the field (who held the previous record). Currently, SHA-256 is the basis of TLS certificates, bitcoin, and many other security applications. We think it is time to begin to migrate to other hash families, because we expect the rest of SHA-256 to fall soon.

I know people (especially around here) hate it when people just post AI output, and I generally agree, since it is trivial for anyone else who is interested to do the same thing. However, the majority of the comments here are from people seemingly asking the author (or someone else) to explain how significant this is, without having taken that step themselves. So while I normally wouldn't do this, in this case it seems helpful. Claude thought the paper was interesting and had a novel cryptographic technique, but that the claims of near-term breaking of the SHA-256 algorithm to be unsupported. Here's the conversation:

https://claude.ai/share/b10b95ef-5d9f-43dd-9005-3d1d89f9dbc1