Original author: Brayden Lindrea
Chopper, Foresight News
A Bitcoin holder sparked widespread discussion on X, claiming to have recovered approximately five bitcoins—worth around $320,000—that had been dormant for over a decade, using Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude.
Recently, anonymous X user Cprkrn told MTS that years ago, he set up an extremely complex multi-layered password on Blockchain.info, which he modified several times, eventually forgetting one of the password sets.
Cprkrn revealed that over the past eight weeks, he attempted to use AI to brute-force trillions of password combinations but made no progress.
Then, at the beginning of the week, with one last attempt in mind, he gathered all his old paper notes, a worn-out laptop, and other materials from his university days, and handed them over to Claude for analysis and retrieval. In the end, the AI helped him recover his forgotten password and a crucial wallet backup file, enabling him to successfully unlock his long-dormant Bitcoin wallet.
Industry reports estimate that between 2.3 million and 4 million bitcoins are permanently inaccessible due to forgotten mnemonic phrases, lost private keys, and permanent asset destruction, accounting for 11%–19% of the total Bitcoin supply. As a result, commercial services have emerged specifically to help users recover lost crypto assets.
So, how did Cprkrn use Claude to recover their Bitcoin?
The mnemonic phrase search lasted eight weeks. Throughout the process, Claude assisted in reviewing and organizing vast amounts of data, including two Mac devices, two external hard drives, exported Apple Notes documents, iCloud emails, Gmail inbox messages, and X platform chat logs—analyzing over 1 GB of data in total.
One of them was an old computer he used in college, where Claude found a critical wallet backup file from December 2019.
Subsequently, with Claude's assistance, Cprkrn deduced the password using memory cues from handwritten notes, successfully decrypted the backup file, recovered the mnemonic phrase of the dormant wallet, and unlocked a Bitcoin.
Although Cprkrn did not directly provide evidence of the process of retrieving the Claude device, he shared a link to the Blockchain.com block explorer: the wallet address 14VJy…ofuE6 transferred approximately 5 bitcoins in five transactions on May 13.
On-chain records show that this batch of Bitcoin has been dormant since early 2015, sleeping for over a decade.
This recovery process was not immediate. Before succeeding, Claude tested over 3.5 trillion passwords. Claude first invoked the open-source mnemonic recovery tool BTCRecover and a Python program to brute-force approximately 34 billion password combinations, but ultimately failed.
Subsequently, using the password cracking tool Hashcat, an additional 340 billion password combinations were tested, all of which failed.
The entire process of massive searching and password cracking was completed by Claude at an AI computing cost of just $15, and it has thoroughly documented the complete recovery procedure.
Although Cprkrn successfully recovered the Bitcoin, many netizens in the crypto community believe the individual overstated Claude’s actual role. Some argue that Claude was only responsible for file retrieval and organization, not directly cracking the wallet, and therefore does not constitute a breakthrough technological achievement.
Reddit user MeteorSwarmGallifrey commented in the technology section: “Claude merely helped him search and organize files throughout; it did not perform any groundbreaking cracking actions.”