X user @cprkrn claims he used Anthropic's Claude to recover 5 Bitcoin locked away for 11 years — worth roughly $400,000 at current prices. The post racked up over 10 million views in 12 hours.
Back in 2014, @cprkrn was in college and bought 5 BTC. After getting high, he changed his wallet password — and woke up with zero recollection of what it was. He still had an old seed phrase, but it didn't match the password-protected wallet file. Over the years, he tried brute-forcing with btcrecover and Hashcat, and even paid for commercial recovery services at $250 a pop. Nothing worked.
https://twitter.com/cprkrn/status/2054586810475364536
Out of options, he fed Claude everything on his old college computer. The AI did three things: sifted through files to find an older version of wallet.dat from before the password change; discovered that btcrecover had the sharedKey and password concatenation order reversed — a bug nobody had caught; and after fixing the logic, ran the decryption once to extract the private key, converted it to WIF (Wallet Import Format), and imported it into a wallet. On-chain records show the 5 BTC were transferred out the same day.
Claude didn't crack the encryption or break Bitcoin's cryptography. This was digital archaeology: finding the right wallet version in old files, then reading the recovery tool's source code and fixing a bug. It only worked because the user still had the old seed phrase and the original computer files. If the private key were truly lost, AI would have been useless.
After the post circulated in crypto circles, Nic Carter, Laura Shin, Jesse Pollak, and others shared it. But on Reddit, plenty of people poured cold water, arguing that @cprkrn's claim that "Claude broke this thing" was overstated — Claude just helped him dig through files and tweak a few lines of code.