Kryptos K4: Discovered, Not Solved—Here’s What Actually Happened
If you’ve been following the Kryptos story, you’ve probably seen headlines claiming the famous CIA sculpture’s K4 passage has been “solved” or that researchers found the “key.” These headlines are misleading, and it’s important to set the record straight—especially for anyone considering bidding in our November 20 auction.
What Actually Happened
In September 2025, two researchers—Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne—visited the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and found five pages of scrambled text that artist Jim Sanborn had accidentally included in his archive donation approximately two years ago.
These weren’t the original K4 plaintext or encryption materials. They were copies of documents Sanborn created in 1990 for a very specific purpose: to show the CIA’s Department of Historical Intelligence that the sculpture’s text wasn’t offensive.
As Sanborn explained, he cut sentences into strips and taped them together out of order so CIA officials could verify the content wasn’t inappropriate, but couldn’t easily remember the full meaning. Think of it as showing someone proof without giving them the complete picture.
From these scrambled fragments—combined with clues Sanborn has publicly released over the years (BERLIN, CLOCK, EAST NORTHEAST)—the researchers pieced together what they believe is the K4 plaintext.
The Researchers Agree: This Wasn’t a “Solve”
Here’s the most important part: the researchers themselves say they didn’t solve K4.
Jarett Kobek stated clearly in a recent podcast interview: “Rich and I recovered the plain text. There’s no way on earth that this is a cryptographic solve, and we have not claimed that.”
Richard Byrne added: “Almost any lay person not read into Kryptos would not be able to make heads or tails of any of this material by themselves. You absolutely had to have the clues that the artist has provided over the past few years to really make sense of it.”
As reported in The New York Times on October 16, both researchers confirmed they do not intend to release the K4 plaintext publicly. The Smithsonian immediately sealed Sanborn’s archival materials for 50 years to protect his intellectual property.
The Critical Distinction
Jim Sanborn himself clarified the confusion: “The headlines say they found the ‘solution’ or the ‘key.’ These are both very incorrect terms. What they found was scrambled text, and not by solving the cryptogram. They did not solve K4 and they certainly did not find the key. This is a very important distinction.”
What the researchers found: Scrambled sentence fragments from 1990 CIA documents
What they don’t have:
- The decryption method used to encode K4
- The encyption key or cipher system
- The original coding charts
- Understanding of how plaintext became ciphertext
- Knowledge of how K4 connects to K5
The K5 Factor
Here’s what really matters for the auction: everything the researchers found relates only to K4.
The auction includes something far more significant: K5, the unpublished continuation that Sanborn designed as the logical extension of Kryptos.
For years, Sanborn has stated that Kryptos was designed to “unravel in layers like peeling an onion.” K2’s plaintext says “They should. It’s buried out there somewhere”—a hint that something follows K4.
As Sanborn explained: “K4 has not been solved. K4 has been discovered and it points in the direction of K5.”
The researchers have no knowledge of K5, how K4 connects to it, or what the complete Kryptos mystery truly reveals. Only the winning bidder will understand the full artistic vision Sanborn created 35 years ago.
Why This Matters
Elonka Dunin, one of the world’s foremost Kryptos researchers, stated in Scientific American: “One thing is to have the words. It’s another to have the method. If they don’t have the method, it’s not solved.”
Think of it this way: if someone finds a completed crossword puzzle in the trash, they didn’t solve it. They just found the answers.
The researchers found answers. What’s being auctioned on November 20 is the solution—the complete understanding of:
- How Sanborn created the encryption
- The method for transforming plaintext into the carved ciphertext
- The coding charts showing the process
- How K4 and K5 connect
- The complete artistic vision of the entire Kryptos project
Plus, the winning bidder gets a private afternoon session where Sanborn personally walks through everything, explaining how all the pieces fit together.
The Bottom Line
Reports claiming K4 has been “solved” are factually incorrect. The researchers themselves acknowledge they recovered plaintext from archive documents—they did not solve the cryptographic puzzle.
The decryption method remains known only to Jim Sanborn and cryptographer Ed Scheidt, who helped design the encryption system in 1988.
And the existence of K5—the continuation of the Kryptos mystery—remains completely untouched by this discovery.
