THE CRUNCH
A Bloomberg developer claims to have solved a 1941 Enigma-encrypted radio message that went unsolved for 83 years using OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra. The 82-character text, sent by a German soldier in Rosenow requesting marching orders, was decrypted by Carter Leffen over a ten-hour period. The AI model handled tasks ranging from searching archives to building a simulator, but the breakthrough relied on a known town name and
The team used a known decrypted message from the same day that contained the town name 'Rosenow' twice, using it as a search term to narrow the possibilities. They also exploited a known Enigma weakness where a letter never encrypts as itself, which helped rule out incorrect positions. The remaining text revealed coherent German phrases like 'Sofort Funkantwort' and 'Angabe des Marschweges', along with typos that the author argues lend authenticity to the result.