Artificial intelligence (AI) has helped uncover new weaknesses in two cryptographic systems, including a simplified version of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) that underpins much of today's internet. It's tempting to interpret this news as AI cracking one of the internet's most important encryption algorithms, but the reality is less dramatic. The full AES-128 algorithm uses 10 rounds of encryption, while Anthropic's research focused on a seven-round version. However, the study stressed that the technique does not work against the full version of AES used to protect real-world systems. He believes the work demonstrates how AI could increasingly help researchers evaluate the strength of cryptographic systems before they are adopted.