A viral X post claims that Claude “cracked” a forgotten Bitcoin wallet to recover 5 BTC from a user’s computer.
But don’t get caught up in the hype, because that’s not what happened. Anthropic’s AI simply helped the owner search their own computer for an old wallet file, which was then decrypted with a password the owner had previously written down in a notebook.
User cprkrn posted the recovery on Wednesday, calling it “the most obvious opening ever” once he realized what had happened.
The owner had been trying to brute force the password for his current Blockchain.com wallet for eight weeks, testing around 3.5 trillion combinations using the btcrecover service on a rented computer chip.
The recovery occurred when the user “threw my entire university computer into Claude” as a last resort, and the assistant located an old wallet backup from December 2019 that was encrypted with a password the user had previously written in a notebook.
The old password decrypted the old backup, which contained the same private keys controlling the current funds, since Bitcoin private keys never change.
The password itself was “lol420fuckthePOLICE!* :)” according to the user’s own X disclosure. Total Vast.ai GPU spend for failed brute force attempts was around $15, with the recovery effectively being a file search.
For context, breaking Bitcoin’s true cryptography would require either a working quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm or a flaw in elliptic curve cryptography that has not been discovered in 16 years of public scrutiny.
CoinDesk’s series on post-quantum security earlier this year covered timeline expectations for this threat, with most researchers putting cryptographically relevant quantum computing at least five to ten years away.
But user experience opens an additional door for AI in crypto. Forgotten wallets from Bitcoin’s early years are now very valuable, and recovery tools like btcrecover have been around for years to help users test password variations against encrypted wallet files.
The problem has always been that most recovery work requires technical expertise that the average owner of a lost bitcoin does not possess.
This is where AI assistants can come in. Instead of manually sorting through folders, timestamps, and backup files over years of accumulated disk clutter, owners can hand over the searching to an LLM and have it identify patterns, narrow the search space, and surface candidate files.
It is believed that millions of bitcoins remain inaccessible because owners lost their passwords, drives, or recovery phrases in the early years.
With bitcoin trading around $79,000, a laptop left in a closet could hold six digits. Back up wallet data carefully, store recovery phrases somewhere other than your memory, and check old hardware before selling it.
