AI decoded Napoleon’s message after 217 years

According to TASS, citing The Daily Telegraph, the contents of an encrypted note from Napoleon I Bonaparte to his general Auguste Frédéric Louis Marmont were restored after 217 years. The decoding was handled by Carter Church, an AI engineer at the American cybersecurity company SentinelOne, who used the OpenAI GPT-6 Astra system.

The note was sent in 1809 on Napoleon’s orders by his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais. The text consisted of about 1.3 thousand encrypted characters.

The cipher used numbers, letters, Greek letters, and conventional symbols, and some of the signs were simply letters or obsolete words. The key to the document was lost, so the meaning of the message remained unclear for more than two centuries.

According to the publication, Church decoded the symbols in six hours and matched them with the work of cryptographers who had previously identified 33 signs. The system then applied the simulated annealing method, trying out word variants and comparing them with Marmont’s surviving texts.

In the message, Napoleon wrote to the general, who was then in Dalmatia, that is, on the territory of present-day Croatia, far from the main forces of the French army: “Austria is being attacked simultaneously from all sides. Therefore, it is rapidly moving toward its downfall”. Later, Marmont was able to join Napoleon’s army, and after the victory in the Battle of Wagram, which ended the War of the Fifth Coalition, he was made a marshal.