The Kryptos Key Is Going Up for Sale

Ever since artist James Sanborn unveiled Kryptos, an outdoor sculpture that sits at CIA headquarters, amateur and professional cryptanalysts have been feverishly attempting to crack the code hidden in its nearly 1800-character message. While they have decoded 3 of the 4 panels of ciphertext in the S-shaped copper artwork, the final panel, known as K4, still defies solution. Only one human being on Earth knows the message of K4: Sanborn. But soon someone else will join the club. Sanborn is putting the answer up for sale.

“I'm auctioning off the 97-character plaintext of K4, which is the secret of Kryptos,” Sanborn tells me. He’s even throwing in a curved metal plate that he used as a cutting sample for the panel that now sits at the agency.

Sanborn has hinted that auctioning off the secret was a possibility, most recently in a March interview he did with me. At the time, he was frustrated by idiots triumphantly and inaccurately claiming they had cracked the code with artificial intelligence.

But why now? “I wanted to be of sound mind and body when it happened, so I could control it in some way,” says Sanborn, who is turning 80 around the time the bidding will commence in November. He could also use the money. As a working artist, he doesn’t have a massive retirement account, and he is particularly concerned that if he or his wife suffered a serious disability, they would face considerable financial challenges. Part of the proceeds, he says, will go to programs for the disabled. The bidding will be handled by RR Auction and the reserve, he says, should be around $300,000.

It’s his hope and assumption that the winning bidder, after experiencing the once-in-a-lifetime thrill of seeing the solution, will take over handling the putative answers from the still-active community of people trying to crack the code. Though handling the queries has been intensive work, (Sanborn fields 30 to 40 letters a week), the artist thinks that it could soon get easier—ironically with the help of AI. After my WIRED article last March, Sanborn says he was contacted by a well-known figure in the AI field. (He won’t say who.) This person outlined how Sanborn could use AI to respond to Kryptos fans, which is funny since much of the annoyance comes from responding to incorrect answers from people using AI. “The irony is not lost on me,” he says. Sanborn himself has no interest in working in tandem with the winning bidder to respond to the stream of would-be solvers, “I’d rather it be over,” he says. “At this point, I'm tired of it.”

But anything could happen. If some wise-ass Bitcoin billionaire prankster snaps up the code, the whole thing could very well blow up. Remember when Martin Shkreli, who likely made a fortune by jacking up the price of a medicine he controlled, was the high bidder for the single copy of a Wu-Tang Clan recording? It was a fiasco! After Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud, the record was seized by the US government, and it was eventually sold to people who planned to carefully release sections of the album as NFTs. But Shkreli had retained his own copies, and briefly started streaming them. The experience showed how an ill-intentioned owner could violate the vision of an artist. Nonetheless, Sanborn says his sale comes without conditions.

For many years, it was assumed that only one other person possibly had the solution: William Webster, the CIA director at the time the sculpture was completed. At the christening, Sanborn handed Webster a sealed envelope that supposedly had the key to Kryptos. Years later, Sanborn hinted that the contents did not have the complete solution. In any case, Webster died on August 8, and no word has come about what happened to that envelope.

Sanborn tells me that he has not formally informed the CIA of his decision (though if they don’t know it’s kind of embarrassing for an intelligence agency with a multi-billion dollar budget). “There’s no question that I can do it–I have rights to the text,” he says. “But there’s so much paranoia floating around, like, what if a Russian oligarch gets a hold of the CIA crypto secret?”

It’s also not clear that having the complete plaintext will actually solve the mystery of Kryptos. Sanborn has indicated that the text of K4 is actually an instruction for how to solve it, and it may well involve other parts of the installation besides the S-shaped metal sculpture with the encrypted text. “Even when K4 has been solved, its riddle will persist as K5,” he wrote in a statement released to a few media organizations. Sanborn did tell me that attaining that complete solution does not require physical access to CIA grounds. Like everyone else in the world but him, I don’t know what the hell that means.

Now someone besides the artist will. “I hope the owner will choose to keep K4 secret,” he says.If they don’t, what's the point? “If you don't have the secrets, you don't have any power.”