Two Americans say they discovered the final 97-character K4 message of the Kryptos sculpture after photographing items in the artist's archive, prompting a public dispute as the sculptor auctions the solution. The discoverers declined an NDA and a proposed share of auction proceeds and went public; they report receiving legal threats from the auction house. Sanborn admits archival errors but says the photos did not include the coding method or key, and a subsequent K5 passage remains unresolved. The debate leaves the larger Kryptos mystery intact.
Archive Photos Spark Claim to Solve Final 'Kryptos' Cipher — Auction Ignites Legal Dispute
Two Americans say they discovered the final 97-character K4 message of the Kryptos sculpture after photographing items in the artist's archive, prompting a public dispute as the sculptor auctions the solution. The discoverers declined an NDA and a proposed share of auction proceeds and went public; they report receiving legal threats from the auction house. Sanborn admits archival errors but says the photos did not include the coding method or key, and a subsequent K5 passage remains unresolved. The debate leaves the larger Kryptos mystery intact.
11:18 AM, 11/19/2025Culture
Two American friends say they uncovered the final 97-character message (K4) hidden in the famed Kryptos sculpture after photographing material in the artist's archived files, touching off a public dispute as the sculptor prepares to auction the solution.
Installed outside CIA headquarters in Virginia in 1990, Jim Sanborn’s S-shaped copper sculpture has fascinated cryptography buffs for decades. Three of its four encrypted passages have been solved; the fourth, known as K4, has resisted decryption and become one of the world’s best-known unsolved ciphers.
How the claimed discovery unfolded
Writer Jarett Kobek says he noticed a reference to the Smithsonian in the auction catalogue and asked his friend Richard Byrne to inspect Sanborn’s archived materials. Byrne photographed several items from the archive and, using those images together with clues Sanborn had shared publicly in the past, Kobek says he deciphered the K4 message within hours.
Reaction and legal tensions
When the pair informed Sanborn of their finding, they say they were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements in exchange for a share of the auction proceeds; they refused. "The NDA is a total non-starter," Kobek said, arguing that accepting money from the sale could implicate them in wrongdoing. After going public with their account, the two say they received cease-and-desist letters from the auction house.
Sanborn, now 80, acknowledged that pieces of archive material had been misplaced and photographed: "They found and photographed five pieces of scrambled texts that I had accidentally placed in the archive boxes all those years ago." He emphasized, however, that the images lacked the coding method and the key needed to reproduce the full forensic solution.
What remains unresolved
Sanborn put the 97-character K4 solution up for auction in August, saying he no longer had the physical, mental or financial resources to safeguard the code himself. The lot has drawn wide interest and is expected to fetch a substantial sum when the sale closes.
Sanborn has also indicated a further stage of the work, referred to as K5, uses a similar but not identical encoding method and will be released after the current auction. Whether the photographed archive fragments truly reveal the K4 plaintext, or merely partial scrambled text without the necessary key or method, remains contested — and the wider Kryptos mystery persists.
Key figures: sculptor Jim Sanborn; writers Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne.