---
title: "Inspired by Claude Fable 5.1 solving the 370-year-old Cyphral Distich, I asked…"
description: "Inspired by Claude Fable 5.1 solving the 370-year-old Cyphral Distich, I asked it to decrypt a message from my good friend Ted Cruz."
author: "Pau Friedman"
kind: "short"
published_at: "2026-09-14"
url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/14/a-message-from-my-good-friend-ted-cruz"
markdown_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/14/a-message-from-my-good-friend-ted-cruz.md"
canonical_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/14/a-message-from-my-good-friend-ted-cruz"
---

# Inspired by Claude Fable 5\.1 solving the 370\-year\-old Cyphral Distich\, I asked…

Inspired by
[Claude Fable 5.1 solving the 370-year-old Cyphral Distich](https://www.vals.ai/blogs/fable-solves-cyphral-distich),
I asked it to decrypt a message from my good friend Ted Cruz.

![The Zodiac Killer's 340-character cipher: a dense grid of hand-drawn letters, circles, triangles, and crosshair symbols](/images/blog/ted-cruz-cipher.webp)

![Claude Code running Fable 5.1. The prompt reads "solve this message that ted cruz sent me" with an attached image. The reply is "API Error: 400 Output blocked by content filtering policy". Baked for 39s.](/images/blog/ted-cruz-cipher-claude.webp)