A hypothetical attack on AES-256 running on a quantum computer would still be math.

@josharian A program which "could" be run on a quantum computer, but doesn't actually rely on quantum operations for any advantage, would not count as "quantum computing" for the purposes of this question, right? (Considering that any program "could" be run on a quantum computer...)

@JamesEAdministrator sure, I guess. But what I'm trying to get at is, "if AES is broken by AI-assisted math that requires quantum-computing to execute/evaluate, which way does the market resolve?"

@retr0id Good point. (Or what happens if AES is somehow broken by a purely classical attack with no major AI assistance?...)

Excepting the quantum aspect, this seems impossibly subjective.

What counts as “broken”? We have a 2^119 attack already! If a researcher crafts a “mere” 2^110 attack (~500x stronger than status quo), would that qualify?

What counts as “assisted”? If that researcher admits to mainly incidental use of LLM-based chatbots during their research, would that qualify?