Jack the Ripper: An AI Analysis Experiment

Can modern AI shed new light on Jack the Ripper? This report records an experiment: Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8, directed by a human editor, convening fictional expert panels grounded in real scholarship to re-examine the Whitechapel murders of 1888–1891.

The panels worked from the eleven-victim police file to a revised criminal profile superseding Dr Thomas Bond’s 1888 original. Two independent geographic analyses converged on the same few hundred yards of Spitalfields. Then 314 profiles of suspects and others tied to the case were scored against the new profile.

The result was negative, and the report says so. The ranking was led by people documented at the scenes and inquests (police surgeons, officers, men who found a body). This showed that the method measured the survival of records, not resemblance to the killer. The case remains unsolved.