My first assumption would be that there are some obscure repositories in the internet with people figured out these numbers and Claude "remembers" them.

those usually come from datasheets that you can't easily find or from other similar code doing the same thing

Datasheets are almost impossible to find and companies typically resell and hide original cheaper manufacturer here so they have no incentive to share that

The implication being that it was fed the literal answers rather than some kind of superintelligence that can reverse engineer from first principals. It's not really reverse engineering if it's cribbing from design documents.

Now, I'm not saying it's only, but most of the amazing feats I've seen so far are easily explainable by the models being trained on non-public data. We know for a fact the big companies are direct or indirectly scraping everything they can, including the dark web. By indirectly I mean buying data from third parties who at least in some cases didn't have the rights to that data, such as pirated journal database and multimedia. Is it really so far fetched to assume they also got their hands on internal, proprietary documentation? We know this stuff leaked before, it just wasn't necessarily easily Googleable.

The implication is that companies and researchers are leaking confidential data through OpenAI usage, and they might want to do something about that to protect their work