ChatGPT deciphered Napoleon's secret message
The GPT-6 Astra model deciphered an encrypted military message from Napoleon Bonaparte to Marshal Auguste de Marmont, sent 217 years ago. Engineer Carter Church used AI to analyze a scanned image, crack the cipher, and restore the text, which turned out to be a French military report on the positions of the Austrian army before the 1809 invasion.
The GPT-6 Astra model deciphered an encrypted military message from Napoleon Bonaparte to Marshal Auguste de Marmont, sent 217 years ago. AI engineer Carter Church presented the results: Astra took about six hours to recognize the document's text, restore encrypted fragments, and decrypt them. The message consisted of 24 lines of encrypted symbols; its image was previously published in a French military history magazine in 1969. Church started with a scanned illustration. The cryptogram contained about 1,300 characters and 155 different symbols; French cryptography historian Daniel Taint had previously identified 33 of them. The decryption turned out to be a French military report from the headquarters of Eugène de Beauharnais about troop positions and movements of the Austrian army on the eve of the 1809 invasion. On March 16, Napoleon ordered this report to be passed to Marmont. The letter was not fully decrypted: Church left five symbols with uncertain meanings, but they do not affect the overall sense. An independent verification was conducted by Satoshi Tomokie, founder of the Cryptiana website.