SentinelOne AI Researcher Decodes 217-Year-Old Coded Letter from Napoleon
A SentinelOne AI researcher has used OpenAI technology to decrypt a 217-year-old coded letter sent by Napoleon Bonaparte, revealing historical troop movements.
A SentinelOne AI researcher has successfully decrypted an encrypted letter sent by Napoleon Bonaparte 217 years ago, solving a historical puzzle that baffled cryptographers for over two centuries. According to a report by The Telegraph, the message was sent to General Auguste de Marmont in 1809 by Eugène, Napoleon's stepson, on the emperor's orders.
The letter consisted of 1,300 characters representing both letters and ancient words, with the decryption key long lost. Carter Church, an AI researcher at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, revealed that he utilized OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra system to decode and transcribe the historical message for the first time.
The decoded letter details French and Austrian troop movements in the days preceding the outbreak of war between France and the Habsburg Empire. "Austria will attack simultaneously on all fronts. It is constantly rushing towards its own destruction," the decrypted text reads.
It took the advanced AI model six hours to transcribe the characters and cross-reference them with previous partial decryptions of 33 characters. Church noted that the inspiration to tackle the letter stemmed from reports that an AI model had previously decoded an encrypted German military message from 1941. However, researchers have warned that the high capabilities demonstrated by AI in cryptanalysis could potentially be exploited to unmask anonymous online profiles.
