Bloomberg product development coach Carter Leffen stated that using OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra Extra High, a 1941 German Army Enigma radio message dated July 10, consisting of 82 characters and archived under number MVUEH, was decoded in about 10 hours after remaining unsolved for 83 years.

The message was sent by a soldier stationed in Rosenow, requesting an immediate radio reply and providing a marching route. The German text includes "Sofort Funkantwort" and "Angabe des Marschweges," translated as "please specify the marching route, I am in Rosenow, please reply immediately;" the text also retains common misspellings by the operator, such as BTTE instead of BITTE.

The model is described as autonomously retrieving historical archives, comparing questionable letters, searching for contextual clues, building an Enigma simulator, writing code for cryptanalysis, conducting parallel experiments, testing competing keys, and cross-verifying. By utilizing the Enigma's property that "letters never encrypt to themselves" to eliminate positions and using place names from already decoded messages on the same day as cribs, the machine settings were calculated after a match was established, resulting in 68 remaining characters forming coherent German. A separate preserved header was used for verification of the settings.

This encrypted message comes from the 1941 German Army interception archives compiled by Frode Weierud and others, belonging to the short messages of the Northern Army Group's communications during the early stages of Operation Barbarossa that had not yet been broken. Some date keys from the same batch of materials had previously been manually restored; Leffen noted that there seem to be about 7 similar unsolved messages remaining in the 1941 archives.

Reports indicate that this operation consumed approximately 650 million tokens. Leffen mentioned that the effort he put into the demonstration website was about 99 times that of the decryption itself. OpenAI positions Astra as a model for end-to-end processing of high-difficulty tasks and has marked it as Critical within the cybersecurity readiness framework.

In market mechanisms, this is a capability demonstration-driven pricing, not a transaction of war history itself: what is bought is an agent's labor that can "write attack code, build simulators, and string archives"; what is sold relies on expert teams advancing classical cryptography and archival organization by the year. Beneficiaries include model vendors and cloud inference credits that need to prove end-to-end network/cryptographic capabilities to enterprise and defense clients; those under pressure are small cryptography history projects that treat unsolved historical encrypted messages as long-term topics, as well as traditional analysis outsourcing still priced by man-hours.

Additionally, the same model was also used for a trial decryption of another 1918 German radio message, cross-referencing locations and dates with naval logs; the Enigma itself was mathematically opened by Marian Rejewski back in 1932, and during World War II, the Allies relied on bombers and process scaling; this time, the increment is integrating retrieval, modeling, attack code, and verification into the same unattended link.

Source: Public Information