For 35 years, amateur and professional cryptographers have tried to crack the code on Kryptos, a majestic sculpture that sits behind CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In the 1990s, the CIA, NSA, and a Rand Corporation computer scientist independently came up with translations for three of the sculpture’s four panels of scrambled letters. But the final segment, known as K4, was encoded with knottier techniques and remains unsolved. This failure has only deepened the obsession of thousands of would-be cryptanalysts. When one of them thinks they have an answer, they write to Jim Sanborn for confirmation. Sanborn is the artist who created the installation and the only person who knows the answer. Lately the pace has picked up. And Sanborn is getting ticked off—though not for the reasons you might think.
Consider the email from one recent would-be codebreaker. “What took 35 years and even the NSA with all their resources could not do I was able to do in only 3 hours before I even had my morning coffee,” it began, before the writer showed Sanborn what they believed to be the cosmically elusive solution. “History’s rewritten,” wrote the submitter. “no errors 100% cracked.” You might ask, what enables someone to believe they’d outperformed the world’s most elite mathematicians and cryptologists, including some spooks who maybe have a quantum computer in the basement? The answer is pure 2025: a chatbot!
It turns out that the current generation of AI models is happy to accept prompts aimed at solving Kryptos, coming up with the decoded message in plaintext, and declaring victory. Sanborn says he’s seeing it more and more. Of course, this writer’s “solution” was dead wrong, like the thousands Sanborn had previously bounced.
Sanborn contacted me recently to express his disgust with this development. “It feels like a major shift,” he says. “The numbers [of submissions] have increased dramatically. And the character of the emails is different—the people that did their code crack with AI are totally convinced that they cracked Kryptos during breakfast! AI seems to be lying to them, telling every one of them that it's 99.99% sure that they cracked Kryptos, congratulations. So they all are very convinced that by the time they reach me, they've cracked it.”
This bothers Sanborn in several ways. Until recently there was an unspoken agreement between the artist and the Kryptos faithful that the effort to crack the code would be taken seriously. (Some years ago, Sanborn began charging $50 to review solutions, providing a speed bump to filter out wild guesses and nut cases.) That back-and-forth fed into the artistic nature of Kryptos; having an object that defies solution in the backyard of the CIA is a subversive commentary on the funhouse-mirror aspect of intelligence gathering, where every truth is cast into doubt. The fact that thousands of people have spent an enormous amount of effort to unveil the plaintext—which, judging from the decoded panels so far, indicates Sanborn’s message is a gloss on secrecy itself. Newcomers seem to have no sense of this complexity.
“The crowd of people trying to crack Kryptos today have no idea what Kryptos is,” says Sanborn. He finds himself sifting through emails from randos using AI shortcuts that require little thought and expertise, let alone appreciation for the challenge. It’s like saying you’ve scaled Everest by taking a helicopter ride to the summit—but worse, because these ankle-biters haven’t solved the code at all. They’ve barely climbed above sea level. Sometimes, in his replies, Sanborn doesn’t hold back. “I infer from your certainty that you used AI,” he told one misguided guesser. “AI lies, and does not have enough info.”
Sanborn, a climate-conscious friend of the Earth who lives on a small island on the Chesapeake Bay, is also appalled by the amount of energy that it takes to produce generative AI, and AI’s fabricated answers. Adding to the annoyance is that some of the would-be codebreakers are touting their collaboration with Grok 3, which is made by Elon Musk’s xAI. The same Musk who, despite good deeds with Tesla, now works for an administration determined to reverse any progress on mitigating climate change. “That’s a little twist of the ice pick,” he says.
Sanborn worries that as more people use AI, his inbox will become even more flooded with pretenders. He’s nearly 80 years old and has long moved on to other art projects. “If this thing does get out of control it could become unmanageable,” he says. He’s even considering putting a hold on his verification process for a while. “I haven't made a decision yet,” he says,
One decision he has made is to not give away the answer in his lifetime. “I would much prefer it to be a forever code,” he says, indicating that this artist will not come in from the cold. After he’s gone, it will be up to his wife. He once mused that at some point the best course would be to auction off the answer, with the money going to climate science. Ideally the winner would maintain the secret as he has. “Who knows how many years I have left?” he says. “It’s still somewhat nebulous.”
At times, surprised at the lack of progress, he has dropped clues to the solution, sharing “cribs”—plaintext translations of several words in the 97-character panel. In 2010 he provided the word BERLIN. Four years later he revealed that the next five characters translated to CLOCK. In 2020, he let us know that the plaintext in positions 26 through 34 was NORTHEAST. Soon after, responding to another failed solution, he mentioned that the four characters preceding that word spelled EAST. (“That was accidental,” says Sanborn. “I wasn’t going to do it but I sort of let it out of the bag.”) Cribs can act like skeleton keys to unlock a thorny message. Not this time. Though each hint generated frantic activity among the large community of wannabe solvers, K4 continues to defy them.
Meanwhile, Sanborn has to be careful about every statement he makes; during our conversation there were some seemingly innocuous questions he wouldn’t answer, in fear of unintentionally giving away another clue. “Tiny little things can be picked up, especially if it's in print and then used as one more nail in the coffin, so to speak,” he says. As for intentionally offering further clues, don’t hold your breath. “That’s it,” he says.
Clearly, despite the drain on Sanborn’s time and attention, he takes pride that his work remains relevant. You may need a security clearance or special permission to view Kryptos, but the invitation to solve it keeps the work perpetually alive, which is an artist’s dream. But then Sanborn checks his mail and sees this: “I’m just a vet,” someone writes. “Cracked it in days with Grok 3.” The answer wasn’t even close.
