Google DeepMind announced new research on X on 6 November. The company said the research demonstrates that AI agents can accelerate the stress-testing of encryption. Its models found the weaknesses, but humans guided the work.

RSA is a public-key encryption method. Its security rests on the fact that factorising a large number into primes is computationally very hard. The bit count gives the key length, and a longer key is harder to break.

The company describes the weaknesses as major. Its posts do not say what the weaknesses are, how the models found them or whether they can be exploited against systems in use. For more detail, the company points to an explanation by its VP Science, who posts on X as @Pushmeet.

Google DeepMind said modern 2048-bit systems remain safe from these specific exploits. Its claim therefore concerns legacy 1024-bit systems, not RSA in general.

The company sees the work as signalling a shift. It said AI is bringing a new era to mathematics and computation, so encryption security can no longer rely on historical assumptions about which computational problems are hard. Cryptographic standards must be continuously stress-tested, the company said.

The information comes from Google DeepMind’s own posts, which include no assessment of the results by independent researchers.