AI proves Signal’s encryption code correct in under half a day for $500
Formal verification has been around for decades. The idea is to use math to prove software works as intended, not just test it until you stop finding bugs. The catch: it has always been painfully slow and expensive, which is why only organizations like NASA and Apple have used it seriously.
That calculus may be shifting. Stanford researcher Chuyue Sun and her fellow computer scientists built an AI tool that completed a formal verification engineering project in less than half a day for under $500. The same work took three highly skilled experts five months to do manually.
The Startups Moving In
Three significant bets are now on the table in this space:
- &Truth: The startup Sun joined in August, which publicly launched this week. Its research demo used AI to verify part of the encryption code inside the Signal messaging app. The company has raised $70 million and aims to eventually support any programming language. Chief science officer Ilya Sergey put it directly:
“Bridges, buildings, they don’t collapse because people did math before constructing them. Why don’t we do the same for code? The technology to mathematically reason was all there, just difficult to scale.”
- Harmonic: Cofounded by Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev and backed by $295 million in funding (including Nvidia’s venture arm), Harmonic announced this week that its math-focused AI agent Aristotle now supports verifying software written in C and hardware designs in Verilog. It’s currently evaluating the technology with chipmakers Tensordyne and Nvidia.
- Anthropic and Theorem: Last week the two companies jointly announced they used AI to find bugs in open source software that trillions of automated tests had missed. They also released a Claude add-on to help other developers run verification work. Costs of the initial project were not disclosed.
The Open Question
Whether AI can push formal verification beyond critical-infrastructure use cases and into everyday software development is still unresolved. The early numbers are striking, but this is a field that has promised scale before and not delivered it. The startups are well-funded and the research results are real. Worth watching.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
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