Start with the artist James Sanborn announced the outdoor sculpture at the CIA headquarters, amateur and professional implicit analysts have been furiously trying to crack the hidden passwords in its nearly 1,800-character message. When they decoded 3 of 3 of 4 ciphertexts in the S-shaped copper artwork, the final panel (called K4) still violated the solution. Only one person on Earth knows the information about K4: Sanborn. But someone will join the club soon. Sanborn is selling the answer.
“I’m auctioning the 97-character plaintext of the K4, which is the secret of the K4,” Sanborn told me. He even threw in a curved metal plate that he used as a cutting sample for the panel now located in the agency.
Sanborn hinted that auction secrets were possible, and the most recent interview was in March, where he interviewed me. At the time, he was frustrated by victory and inaccurate claims that they had cracked the code with artificial intelligence.
But why now? “I want to be a healthy mind and body, so that I can control it somehow,” Sanborn said, who will be 80 when the bid begins in November. He can use the money, too. As a working artist, he does not have a large number of retirement accounts and he is particularly concerned that if he or his wife suffers from severe disability, they will face enormous financial challenges. He said part of the proceeds will go to programs for people with disabilities. He said the bid will be handled by RR auction and the reserve should be about $300,000.
His hope and assumption is that after seeing the once-in-a-lifetime pleasure of the solution, the winning bidder will take over the presumptive answers of the still active people who are trying to crack the code. Although handling doubts has always been intensive (Sanborn Fields 30 to 40 letters a week), artists think it will soon become easier, ironically with the help of AI. After my wired article last March, Sanborn said he was connected with a prominent figure in the field of AI. (He won’t say who it is.) This guy outlines how Sanborn uses AI to react to Kryptos fans, which is interesting because many of the annoyances come from responses to the wrong answers of people using AI. “Ironically, I’m not losing it,” he said. Sanborn himself was not interested in working with the winning bidder to deal with possible solvers, “I’d rather end it,” he said. “At this point, I’m tired.”
But everything can happen. If some wise bitcoin billionaire prankster snapped up the code, the whole thing is likely to explode. Remember when Martin Shkreli might have made a fortune by raising the price of drugs he controlled, being a high-priced bidder for a single copy of the Wu-Tang clan recording? That was a crushing defeat! After Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud, the record was confiscated by the U.S. government and eventually sold it to people planning to carefully release the album. But Shkreli kept his own copy and briefly started playing them. This experience shows how the unconscious master violates the artist’s vision. Still, Sanborn said there are no conditions for his sale.
