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An X user claimed that Claude AI helped him recover access to a Bitcoin wallet worth about $400,000 after 11 years of failed attempts. The user said the AI did not hack Bitcoin, but instead helped locate a forgotten wallet file and use an existing mnemonic phrase to restore access, sparking debate online about whether the story reflects genuine AI “cracking” or simply overlooked file management.
The post, shared on May 13, 2026 by an X account identified as Cprkrn, said claude.ai “just helped” crack the password to an old digital wallet. The user tagged Anthropic and said he would name his child after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
Cprkrn said he bought Bitcoin during college when each coin was around $250. He later changed the password to his wallet but forgot it, and then spent more than 11 years trying to recover access.
In the post, Cprkrn said he was locked out of $398,000 by what he described as a friend’s ideas about a secure password. He also publicly shared the password as “lol420fuckthePOLICE!:)”.
He said he tried to reclaim the password for years, working through “trillions of potential combinations.” He used tools including BTCRecover, described as open-source Bitcoin wallet recovery software, and Hashcat, which tests large numbers of password candidates quickly—without success.
According to Cprkrn, the breakthrough came after he uploaded files from his old computer into Claude and asked for help. He said Claude did not break the lock, but instead discovered an old wallet.dat file that he had forgotten existed.
Cprkrn explained that wallet.dat is the file used by Bitcoin Core to store wallet data. He said he had a mnemonic phrase written down somewhere, describing it as a string of words that functions as the master key to a wallet. He said Claude combined the mnemonic phrase with the older wallet file, which then made the original password accessible.
“It found an OLD wallet file that the mnemonic successfully decrypted. Locked out 11+ years because I got stoned and changed the password. Ended up being the most obvious opening ever lol,” Cprkrn said.
Cprkrn also shared a screenshot showing Claude running multiple commands in a terminal window. He said Claude checked BTCRecover’s decryption approach, ran a decrypt using what it described as “sharedKey + password concatenated,” and then reported that private keys were decrypted.
In the screenshot text, Claude allegedly wrote: “PRIVATE KEYS DECRYPTED! Let me convert to WIF format and verify addresses:” followed by “WE GOT IT!!! THE 5 BTC IS YOURS!”
After the recovery, Cprkrn said he was about $400,000 richer than he was earlier that day. Some commenters online assumed Claude had broken Bitcoin’s encryption or guessed the password, while others—mostly on Reddit—argued the AI likely helped by locating and analyzing files.
The article also referenced a recovery expert’s view that Claude did not break Bitcoin’s encryption, but instead analyzed historical data.
Thousands of comments appeared on a Reddit thread. Some mocked the user for spending 11 years trying to crack the password instead of searching his own files.
One commenter, identified as irritatedellipses, defended the approach by arguing that people may not know what to look for. The commenter said that understanding how wallets store information—and how older wallet files may persist as backups or alternate files—matters before attempting recovery.
“To some folks, not searching for an old wallet file with a key phrase in it is a moronic move, but break down the pieces of information you have to have to know to do that: You have to know that wallets store that info. You have to know that it’s readable by some utility. You have to know that old wallets aren’t just deleted with a new one or whatever, they’re .bak’d or what have you,” the commenter said.
Some Reddit users questioned the authenticity of the story, while others said they reflected on their own Bitcoin regrets.
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