Overview
- An AI engineer, Carter Church of SentinelOne, used OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra to transcribe and help solve a ciphered message from March 1809, producing a reconstruction that experts have now marked solved.
- The model performed roughly six hours of automated processing while Church spent several evenings preparing inputs, running computational solvers and reviewing results to turn symbol transcriptions into readable text.
- GPT-6 located a previously compiled partial key by cryptology historian Daniel Tant and the combined approach used simulated-annealing style solvers and human checks to fill the remaining symbols.
- Cryptiana reviewer Satoshi Tomokiyo verified the solution and Church published the reconstructed key, full transcription and supporting code so other researchers can reproduce and test the result.
- The decoded text is a routine military briefing listing troop positions and strengths, and historians stress the outcome shows how AI can aid niche research but does not mean AI can automatically or reliably decode all unknown historical ciphers.