In September 2026, a developer who goes by Prinz said GPT-6 Astra helped decode a German naval radio message from 1918, 108 years after it was sent. If the claim holds up, it could add a small but interesting piece to what we know about Black Sea intelligence in the closing weeks of World War I. So far, though, there doesn’t seem to be much public reaction from experts.
Prinz said the breakthrough came from recovering plaintext from the German ADFGVX cipher with the keyword “TRUPPENVERSCHIEBUNG,” meaning troop movement. In translation, the message reads: “An English cruiser arrived at Sevastopol on the ?4th; an Allied squadron follows on the 26th.” One digit in the date is still uncertain.
Prinz also said the surviving records line up with that reading. HMS Canterbury reached Sevastopol on November 24, 1918, and an Allied squadron followed on November 26. That’s the part that gives the claim some weight, because readable German by itself doesn’t prove a solve is right. In Prinz’s telling, the message matches real events near Crimea.
If you follow historical cryptography, this one is worth keeping an eye on. Still, caution makes sense. Public expert reaction looks thin, no widely cited response from places like Bletchley Park or German archives had surfaced, and, by Prinz’s own account, the reported solve depended on a mix of software, human steering, keyword selection, and checks against archival records.
The claim appears in Prinz’s research account. Prinz also places it within a broader pattern: computers being used to revisit stubborn ciphers from the 20th century that had resisted earlier attempts.
Author: Jesús Bosque
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