Eric Lu and the Cognition research team have factored RSA-260, a 260-digit number, setting a new public record for the RSA Factoring Challenge. The previous record, RSA-250, was set in February 2020. This achievement was accomplished using Devin, an autonomous software engineering agent, which built a high-performance GPU lattice siever implementing the General Number Field Sieve (GNFS) algorithm. The implementation modified CADO-NFS and required no major algorithmic breakthroughs, relying instead on GPU performance engineering.

The factorization cost approximately 4,900 GPU-days (13.5 GPU-years), totaling roughly $400k at current market prices. The effort was split across polynomial selection (643 GPU-days), lattice sieving (3,813 GPU-days), and linear system solving (467 GPU-days). Lu estimates that hyperscalers or frontier AI labs could factor RSA-1024 numbers for around $30 million per number, while RSA-2048 remains roughly a billion times harder and unaffected by this work.

Lu emphasizes that Devin autonomously handled measurements, cluster operations, and optimization end-to-end, substituting what would have been a multi-month effort by specialized experts. He concludes that the barrier to entry for cryptanalytic work and large-scale scientific computing is far lower than before, encouraging ambitious exploration of autonomous agents in research.