Carter Leffen, a product development coach at Bloomberg LP, successfully decrypted a German military radio message sent in 1941. The 82-character ciphertext, labeled MVUEH, had remained unsolved for 83 years and was encrypted using an Enigma machine.
The project utilized OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, specifically the Extra High version, which required approximately 10 hours of processing. The AI agents performed tasks including historical archive retrieval, Enigma simulator construction, code writing, and parallel key testing.
The breakthrough relied on identifying the location Rosenow, which appeared in a previously decrypted message from the same day. By applying the Enigma constraint that a letter cannot be encrypted as itself, the team narrowed down potential machine settings.
The decrypted text includes phrases such as request for march route instructions and a demand for an immediate radio reply. The text contains specific spelling errors, such as BTTE instead of BITTE, which the researchers cite as evidence of the result's authenticity.
Leffen has released the project's code, search data, and a 3D Enigma simulator for public download. The findings are based on prior cryptographic research by Frode Weierud, Geoff Sullivan, and Olaf Ostwald, and await further expert peer review.
