Napoleon

A coded letter sent on Napoleon Bonaparte's orders in March 1809 has finally been read, 217 years after it was written. The breakthrough came not from a professional cryptographer but from Carter Church, an AI engineer at the cybersecurity firm Sentinel One, who turned OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra loose on the document and had a solution in about six hours. What emerged was a secret military briefing written two weeks before Austria invaded Bavaria, listing French, Bavarian, Polish and Saxon positions on the eve of war. A Cipher That Defeated Every Codebreaker for 217 Years The letter survived only through a single reproduction in a 1969 French army journal, the Revue historique des Armées, printed under the wrong date. Its opening