Open letter by sculptor Jim Sanborn, August 2025
Dear Kryptos fans, detractors, sleuths, spies, geniuses, CIA employees, cryptographers, and miscellaneous provocateurs,
I decided several years ago that the best way to maintain the stewardship of the K4 code section of my sculpture at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia after my passing is to have the plain text — the secret of K4 — sold at auction to the highest bidder. This auction will take place in November of this year, coinciding with my 80th birthday and the 35th anniversary of building Kryptos.
For 35 years I have followed my personal directive to maintain public access to the K4 section of Kryptos. This has required tremendous — and recently accelerating — effort to respond to literally tens of thousands of emails and letters (pre-internet) from potential codebreakers around the world. Kryptos is only one of dozens of my projects, but it has become a time-consuming distraction, and I can no longer do this. There is, though, a glimmer of hope for simplifying this process.
This decision has not been an easy one, and many in the Kryptos community will find it upsetting. I am very sorry for that. What I have learned over the years is that Kryptos and its codes have had a larger positive effect than I ever imagined, and in ways I never imagined. Its systems are taught in schools, its image is in many Algebra 2 textbooks, it’s the subject of several courses of study, and it has even been used as a therapeutic tool for brain injury and PTSD. These developments have given me great satisfaction. I will miss the experience, and I hope other uses may be found in the future.
I have been a full-time artist for over 50 years and, as many self-employed people will understand, I have consistently lived a feast-or-famine existence. Now, add to that the limitations of old age, and I no longer have the physical, mental, or financial resources to maintain the 97-character K4 code section of my sculpture and continue my other projects.
While AI has been a recent curse for Kryptos K4 and is responsible for a flood of meaningless decrypts that I have had to address, I believe it’s now possible that AI has reached a level of sophistication that would allow it to maintain secure stewardship of K4, and importantly, enable a verification process. We are currently working on such a system. In the future, this system will be transferable to the new owner of K4 and will require little effort on their part to deploy.
I sincerely hope the new owner will choose to keep K4 a secret. If they don’t, then (CLUE) what’s the point? Power resides with a secret, not without it.
My stewardship role for K4 is over, and I sincerely hope there will be a peaceful transfer of the code to its new owner. I have said before, even when K4 has been solved, its riddle will persist as K5.
All the best,
Jim Sanborn
Page created: August 14, 2025
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