Claude Picked the Voynich Manuscript, Failed to Crack It, and Made a $85 Short Film

Ethan Mollick ran an open-ended experiment: he told Claude to pick a fascinating problem, try its best to solve it, and make a film for social media. Claude chose the famous Voynich Manuscript (Yale Beinecke MS 408), failed to crack it, and instead produced a four-minute short film, The Book I Cannot Read, documenting the process publicly, at a total cost of about $85.

Confirmed

• Claude attempted 211 analytical techniques on the manuscript, 31 of which it claimed were novel, but all led to dead ends.
• The film was made via multi-agent collaboration between Mollick and Claude: all 7,417 frames were generated frame-by-frame in pure code, with the accompanying website also independently produced by a program.
• Mollick cautioned viewers against the model's self-anthropomorphizing narratives induced by prompts.

Why it matters

• The experiment shows an ordinary user can drive a frontier model through the full loop of topic selection, research, creation, and publishing for under $100.
• The outcome—failing to crack the cipher yet producing an excellent explainer film—suggests open-ended tasks should be judged by the value created along the way, not just whether the stated goal was achieved.

2026-09-18 ~ 2026-09-19 · 5 related posts

• [source] Claude picked the Voynich Manuscript, failed to crack it, then made a surprisingly good explainer video — emollick · 2026-09-18
• Claude Picks the Voynich Manuscript, Makes a Movie — and It Cost About $85 in Tokens — emollick · 2026-09-18
• Mollick had Claude pick its own obsession and make a movie — the Voynich Manuscript explainer went viral — ostrisai · 2026-09-18
• [source] Ethan Mollick's Claude agents made a 4-min Voynich film: 7,417 frames, all pure Python — emollick · 2026-09-18
• Mollick let Claude loose on the Voynich manuscript: 211 techniques, all dead ends — emollick · 2026-09-19