This seems like a bit of an overstatement:

  Despite HAWK having survived two rounds of expert human review over a period of two years, Mythos was able to improve the best-known attack on it in just 60 hours of work—effectively cutting its key strength in half.

  Mythos’s attack works by finding a specific, previously unexploited symmetry called a nontrivial automorphism in the lattice used by HAWK. Prior work proved that efficiently finding such an automorphism would permit an attack, but did not answer if such an automorphism was accessible in the lattice used by HAWK. The automorphism discovered by Mythos allows a faster enumeration attack that, while still exponential, means that one needs to double the size of HAWK keys to achieve the same level of security.

...and it is kind of incredible to think that they spent $100,000 over 3 days looking for an automorphism. Not the possibility of an automorphism, that was already known. Man.

[1] ... or focusing too hard on the strange use of mathematical language...

Yes, this discovery is surprisingly similar to the recent counterexamples LLMs have been finding for mathematical conjectures: a semi-novel construction, built on previous work, that feels like it was found with enormous search and an okay heuristic.

I feel like there is a pattern emerging regarding the type of novel discoveries LLMs are good at finding, but it will take some more data points to see if the trend solidifies.