Anthropic is hailing the results of two cryptographic problems it threw at its Mythos AI security model that found weaknesses in the mathematical problems underpinning the robustness of two algorithms. At the moment, it’s hard to know how much of the company’s reporting is marketing hype, but the findings are still worth paying attention to because they could signal important advances in breaking cryptography that’s crucial to privacy and security.

Before digging into the results, a few caveats.

First, the outcomes are incremental. They don’t break any of the cryptosystems anyone relies on today. Instead, they reveal methods for moderately reducing the work that would be required to defeat the systems.