An open-source community has surpassed Google’s performance in breaking elliptic curve cryptography by over 68 percent, using an artificial intelligence harness and a public leaderboard called ecdsa.fail, the company says. This followed Google’s April disclosure of a 20x reduction in the program size needed for the task, shared not as code but as a zero-knowledge proof.
“This was a milestone in new ways of doing research,” says Will Zeng, noting the impact of AI-assisted progress on a decades-old problem. Unitary Foundation is now expanding this model with the QEC Challenge, a new leaderboard focused on optimizing quantum error correcting codes.
AI-Assisted Reduction of Elliptic Curve Cryptography Programs
Following Google’s April demonstration of a 20x reduction in program size for breaking elliptic curve cryptography, an open-source community rapidly built upon that advancement using an AI-driven platform. The community adopted the zero-knowledge proof checker released by Google as validation for an AI harness, establishing the ecdsa.fail leaderboard to support competition and improvement. This collaborative effort surpassed Google’s initial results, achieving over 68 percent better performance on the same algorithms, according to the company.
The approach allows both human contributors and AI agents to operate within a tight feedback loop, rapidly iterating between ideas and verified results. The foundation has also compiled an index of similar challenges in quantum information, including those focused on stabilizer rank decompositions, Clifft’s circuit optimizer, and hardware benchmarks on Metriq.
A functional harness, Zeng explains, requires only a problem with a verifiable answer and a public board to track progress, allowing the best current solution to be the new baseline for all participants. The foundation invites contributions to its index via Discord or GitHub, signaling a commitment to encouraging this collaborative, AI-assisted research paradigm.
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