The claim appears to be false.

But it was likely motivated by a real phenomenon: Feed it the right prompts, and O1 will often claim to solve various open questions in mathematics and computer science. Sometimes the suggestions are actually real and viable -- e.g. an iterative program on the Weaire–Phelan structure to find better solutions to the 3D tiling problem -- but usually there's a flaw in its reasoning somewhere. Worst case, it'll just make shit up. "Y-yeah, I discovered an algorithm that can crack crypto in real time" definitely falls into that category.

Hotz claims that Axios is reporting this but the only relevant article on Axios I could find [1] did not mention the cracking crypto part (or anything about polynomial time algorithms for factoring).

Big if true, but until we get some kind of official confirmation I will remain skeptical. I wouldn't put it past Hotz for this to be a troll for the lols.

1. https://www.axios.com/2025/01/19/ai-superagent-openai-meta