A Bitcoin holder posting as cprkrn on X (Twitter) said he recovered 5 BTC from a wallet locked for more than 11 years after uploading his old college computer files to Anthropic’s Claude AI.
They claimed the chatbot found an encrypted wallet file, debugged the open-source tool btcrecover, decrypted the keys, and converted them to Wallet Import Format. He had paid roughly $250 per failed attempt at commercial services before turning to AI.
How Claude Cracked the Wallet
cprkrn said he uploaded files from his old college machine to Claude as a last attempt. The chatbot located an encrypted wallet file among the dumped data, then turned to btcrecover, a widely used open-source recovery utility.
Screenshots posted to X show the model worked through the password logic. It found that btcrecover concatenates a sharedKey value with the user password during decryption. The private keys then decrypted on the first corrected run.
The recovery hinged on a mnemonic the user said he rediscovered weeks earlier. He set the original password while in college and changed it shortly after, joining a long list of crypto fortunes stranded for years.
Last ditch effort dumped my whole college computer into Claude. It found an OLD wallet file that the pneumonic successfully decrypted,” posted cprkrn.
With the pioneer crypto now trading for $79,622, the recovery is now worth almost $400,000.
Why the Case Is Drawing Attention
The recovery post drew more than one million views within hours. Castle Island Ventures partner Nic Carter called the result “insane.” Crypto journalist Laura Shin and Base creator Jesse Pollak posted similar reactions.
Experts say the recovery is proof of how general-purpose AI now handles specialized cyber and debugging work.
Meanwhile, wider attention has followed Anthropic as Claude’s capabilities expand.
The case adds to a growing pile of recoveries tied to long-dormant addresses. Roughly a third of all Bitcoin supply remains held in wallets that have not moved in years, per Glassnode data on dormant coins.
Whether the technique extends to other forgotten wallets depends on the files holders kept from earlier years. cprkrn advised others to upload everything from old machines and notebooks before giving up.
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