Artificial intelligence deciphered Napoleon's letter that remained a mystery for 217 years

In 1809, France was preparing for a new war with Austria. One of Napoleon's generals, Auguste de Marmont, was at this time in the territory of modern Croatia, far from the main French forces. It was to him that Napoleon sent encrypted orders through his stepson, Eugène.

The letter consisted of approximately 1300 characters. Some of them represented individual letters, while others represented entire words. The key to the cipher was lost, so for more than two centuries, the content of the message remained unknown.

As The Telegraph writes, it was deciphered by SentinelOne engineer Carter Church. For this, he used the OpenAI GPT-6 Astra artificial intelligence system.

First, the AI recognized and transcribed the symbols from the letter. As a starting point, it used the work of cryptographers who had previously managed to determine the meaning of 33 characters.

Then the system began to determine the meanings of unknown characters. For this, it checked various options and evaluated how characteristic the resulting combinations were for the French language. Works by Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas, as well as Marmont's memoirs, were used as samples. This allowed the rest of the message to be deciphered and revealed that some characters represented not individual letters, but entire words.

Church himself says that he had never previously been involved in breaking ciphers. According to him, he was prompted to try to decipher Napoleon's letter by another researcher's experiment with GPT-6 Astra. The system was tasked with finding and deciphering an unsolved message from the German army, encoded by an Enigma machine in 1941. The AI completed it in about ten hours.

The deciphered letter from Napoleon concerned preparations for the war between France and the Habsburg Empire. Austria was then preparing for a new war, hoping to regain previously lost territories.

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The message to Marmont reported the location and strength of French and Austrian troops. The general was ordered to prepare for a campaign and not to let himself be "intimidated by a few detachments or a rabble of a mob."

"Austria will be immediately attacked from all sides. Thus, it is rapidly approaching its downfall," the letter stated.

As a result, Marmont's army was able to leave Croatia and join Napoleon's main forces. It participated in the Battle of Wagram, where the French army defeated the Austrians. After this, Marmont received the title of Marshal.

As Church himself notes, the letter could have been deciphered without artificial intelligence. But it could have taken a specialist weeks to do such work, which is why the encrypted message remained unread for over two centuries. With the help of GPT-6 Astra, the engineer managed it much faster. According to him, the work took several evenings, and the model worked for about six hours in total.

However, AI's ability to quickly analyze a large number of options can have other applications. Researchers note that such systems can, for example, identify people behind anonymous accounts by matching their writing styles with other data.

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