Two RSA Cryptography Records Fall in 16 Days as AI Accelerates Factorization

Researchers using AI systems have factored two increasingly large RSA numbers in rapid succession, demonstrating how artificial intelligence is accelerating classical cryptographic attacks. On September 3, 2026, engineer Eric Lu of Cognition factored RSA-260, an 862-bit semiprime from the 1991 RSA Factoring Challenge, using GPU-optimized algorithms coordinated by the company's Devin software engineering agent. Just 16 days later, on September 19, Anthropic researcher Stephen A. Weis factored the larger RSA-896 (896 bits) with assistance from Claude, the company's AI model, pushing the public factorization record forward once again.