Claude helps recover $400K in Bitcoin after an expensive mistake

There’s a whole subgenre of crypto horror stories built around people who bought Bitcoin early, realized they’d lost access to it once the value skyrocketed, and then had to spend the next decade staring into the middle distance. One especially famous case involves a man who’s now dedicated his life to searching a Welsh landfill for a small fortune. This latest tale looked like it belonged in the same pile, until Claude apparently helped give an 11-year Bitcoin search saga a happy ending.

In a post on X, user @cprkrn claimed that Anthropic’s Claude helped him recover access to 5 BTC from an old Blockchain.com wallet. It was originally purchased for around $1,250, and is worth almost $400,000 at the time of writing. In the post, he celebrated that “Claude just cracked this,” thanked Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei, and offered to name his child after the latter.

Before you panic-dump your crypto because AI can apparently crack Bitcoin wallets now, breathe. That isn’t quite what happened here. Based on the user’s own thread and screenshots, Claude seems to have helped him work through a messy recovery process involving a wallet backup and an old password clue.

The user says he had been locked out of the wallet for more than 11 years after getting high and changing the password. After trying trillions of password combinations without success, he says he made one last attempt by dumping files from his old college computer into Claude. The breakthrough, according to the thread, was that Claude found an old wallet file that could be decrypted using an old mnemonic/password he had found in a notebook.

The password he finally discovered, with Claude’s help, was as unserious as you might expect. We won’t include it here due to its profanity, but suffice to say, it certainly does feel thematically consistent with being locked out for 11 years because you got stoned and changed your wallet password.

So AI can’t yet crack crypto wallets, but this is an example of one of its strong use-cases: acting as a tireless assistant that could sift through years-old files and connect the dots once it has found what you’re looking for. Not bad for a chatbot, though maybe still not worth naming your kid Dario.