What is being reported
According to t3n, developer Carter Church has deciphered an encrypted letter from Napoleon Bonaparte. The letter, dated March 1809, was addressed to officer Auguste de Marmont, whose troops were stationed in Dalmatia. The key with which Marmont presumably decoded the letter is considered lost; according to the article, the content was therefore unknown for 217 years.
According to the report, the text comprises around 1,300 characters drawn from 155 different symbols. Human cryptographers had decoded 33 of the characters in previous decades. t3n reports that the AI model GPT-6 Astra computed for six hours using a method called simulated annealing, which compares candidate solutions against letter-frequency statistics of French texts.
What the content reportedly says
t3n states that the letter informs the officer about the positions of Napoleon's troops, including 40,000 Bavarian soldiers near Munich or Passau and an elite corps near Augsburg.
Context
Based on the available source metadata, the report relies on a single t3n article. The vendor-independent confirmation by archives, historians or cryptographers is not present in the available evidence. The use of GPT-6 Astra is likewise supported only by this one source. If the result is independently verified, it would be a concrete application of AI in historical cryptanalysis. For companies, the case mainly signals what such models may be capable of with large search spaces; the source does not show a direct business benefit.
Sources
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