AI May Have Cracked the Zodiac Killer's Z13 Cipher

Amateur codebreaker Alex Baber used an AI program to decode the Zodiac Killer's 13-character Z13 cipher, yielding the name Marvin Merrill — an alias of a suspect in the Black Dahlia case. Cryptographers doubt the solution given the cipher's brevity, but note AI has already cracked WWII spy ciphers and a Cold War message found in a bottle.

• AI generated 71 million name candidates for Z13, filtering out non-existent people
• Cryptographer Klaus Schmeh calls Z13 unsolvable due to its 13-character length
• GPT-6 Astra helped crack five ciphers of spy Walter Koehler using a 1893 prayer book
• DeepMind Ithaca restores damaged Greek inscriptions