LLM-Generated Passwords Look Strong but Crack in Hours, Researchers Find (theregister.com)
(Thursday February 19, 2026 @10:30PM (msmash)
from the security-woes dept.)
AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models -- Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini -- appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only 30 of the returned passwords were unique, and [1]18 of the duplicates were the exact same string . The estimated entropy of LLM-generated 16-character passwords came in around 20 to 27 bits, far below the 98 to 120 bits expected of truly random passwords.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/generating_passwords_with_llms/
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/generating_passwords_with_llms/