AI Helps User Recover $400,000 Bitcoin Wallet Locked for 11 Years

A crypto holder known on X as "cprkrn" has recovered 5 BTC worth approximately $400,000 after Anthropic's Claude AI helped him regain access to a wallet that had been inaccessible since April 2015 ^[1].

The user had forgotten a password he changed while intoxicated, locking him out of his Blockchain.com wallet. Despite running billions of password combinations through tools like btcrecover and hashcat over the years, he had no success ^[1].

The breakthrough came when he fed files from an old college computer into Claude. The AI identified an old wallet backup file that matched a mnemonic phrase he had previously found in a physical notebook. By decrypting that older backup - which predated the forgotten password change - the private key for the wallet was recovered. The 5 BTC were subsequently moved in three transactions and appear to have been sold via the service Hyperunit ^[1].

The revealed password was "lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)", which cprkrn shared publicly ^[1].

Security experts and the user himself were quick to clarify that Claude did not break Bitcoin's cryptography or crack a seed phrase. Rather, it performed targeted analysis of local files to locate a usable backup. Analysts note the case highlights the risks of storing wallet files or backups on internet-connected devices or uploading them to cloud-based AI services ^[1].