Jim Sanborn’s inbox is flooded with amateur cryptographers who say they’ve cracked the code with chatbots like Grok 3.

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.

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