Cryptocurrency Owner Retrieves $320K in Bitcoin Using Anthropic's Claude AI After 11-Year Lockout
After being locked out of his cryptocurrency wallet for over a decade, an investor successfully recovered 5 Bitcoin valued at approximately $320,000 with assistance from Claude, Anthropic's artificial intelligence chatbot.
An X post from a Bitcoin holder has achieved viral status following his claim that he utilized Claude, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Anthropic, to regain access to 5 Bitcoin valued at approximately $320,000 that had been inaccessible for over ten years.
During a Wednesday interview with MTS, the X user operating under the pseudonym Cprkrn explained that he had created "really complicated passwords" on blockchain.info and subsequently lost track of one among three passwords after modifying it years earlier.
During the past eight weeks, Cprkrn explained that he employed artificial intelligence in an attempt to brute force his way through "trillions of passwords," though these efforts proved fruitless.
Subsequently, as a "last-ditch effort" at the beginning of this week, Cprkrn reported that he compiled all of his old notebooks from college along with a previously used laptop and uploaded them into Claude, which assisted him in retrieving an old password and a vital wallet backup file that matched that password, which ultimately allowed him to regain entry to the Bitcoin wallet.
According to industry reports, anywhere from 2.3 million to 4 million Bitcoin (BTC) remain inaccessible, accounting for approximately 11% to 19% of the digital currency's total maximum supply due to lost or forgotten seed phrases, destroyed coins or various other factors. Entire companies have been established specifically to assist cryptocurrency holders in recovering their lost digital assets.
How Cprkrn used Claude to recover his Bitcoin
The seed phrase recovery operation conducted by Cprkrn spanned eight weeks, during which Claude assisted him in searching through two Mac computers, two external hard drives, an export from Apple Notes, iCloud Mail, a Gmail inbox and X messages, comprising over 1 gigabyte of data.
Among those devices was his computer from college, where Claude located a critical wallet backup file dating back to December 2019.
Following that discovery, Cprkrn, working alongside Claude's assistance, successfully decrypted the file by utilizing a password that originated from a notebook mnemonic, which allowed him to locate the seed phrase for the Bitcoin wallet that had remained dormant for years.
Although Cprkrn did not offer direct proof of Claude scanning through his devices, he provided a link from Blockchain.com's Bitcoin explorer demonstrating that approximately 5 Bitcoin was moved from wallet address "14VJy…ofuE6" through five transactions on May 13.
Before those transactions took place, the coins had remained untouched since early 2015.
Over 3.5 trillion passwords were tested before succeeding
The successful recovery occurred after Claude had unsuccessfully employed BTCRecover — an open-source seed recovery tool — along with the software program Python to examine approximately 34 billion passwords through brute force methods.
Claude additionally utilized password recovery tool Hashcat to examine another 3.4 trillion passwords, which similarly failed to produce results.
According to Claude's summary of the recovery efforts, only $15 in AI compute was required to perform the searches and password testing.
Notwithstanding the successful outcome, certain members of the cryptocurrency community have stated that Cprkrn exaggerated Claude's contribution in recovering the Bitcoin, contending that it merely provided assistance with the search operations and didn't actually crack the wallet in the manner Cprkrn implied.
"Claude didn't do anything other than search his files," Reddit user MeteorSwarmGallifrey said in the technology subreddit, adding that Claude didn't do anything "groundbreaking."