AI helps crack Napoleon's 200-year-old secret message in six hours

A wartime secret message written by Napoleon Bonaparte, unread for more than 200 years, has been deciphered with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). The message, sent to a French army general in 1809, consisted of two dozen lines mixing symbols, numbers and letters.

Credit for cracking the code goes to American AI engineer Carter Church, after the coded message had sat neglected in online academic archives. Church, 27, who works at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, used OpenAI's latest model, the company behind ChatGPT, to work out the message's meaning in just six hours. He said the task would have taken weeks using older methods.

He added that cracking the code did not require much knowledge of cryptographic techniques or the history of that era. The episode shows that unlocking the secrets of old archives is no longer the preserve of scholars and veteran cryptographers alone.