A Bitcoin holder has gone viral after claiming he recovered around $400,000 in BTC from a wallet that had been locked for more than a decade, with help from Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude.
The user, known as Cprkrn on X, shared the wild crypto recovery story on May 13, saying Claude helped him regain access to 5 Bitcoin after years of failed attempts.
“Holy f***king sh*t omg Claude just cracked this sht,” he wrote in the viral post, thanking Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at around $79,600, putting the 5 BTC recovery at roughly $398,000.
Man uses Claude to recover $400K worth of lost Bitcoin
According to the thread, the wallet had been locked since the user’s college days. He said he originally bought the crypto when it was worth around $250 per coin, before losing access after changing the wallet password while high.
The password, as later revealed in the post, was: “lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)”
The user said he had tried for years to recover the funds, claiming he ran through trillions of possible password combinations. However, the breakthrough reportedly came when he uploaded files from his old college computer into Claude.
Rather than simply guessing the password, Claude helped dig through the old files and identify an older wallet.dat file that appeared to predate the password change. The user also reportedly had an old mnemonic phrase, which helped unlock the wallet once the correct file was found.
I tried like 7 trillion passwords lmfao
Found this old pneumonic a few weeks ago that ended up being the old password before I changed it
Thought I was screwed
Last ditch effort dumped my whole college computer into Claude
It found an OLD wallet file that the pneumonic…
— 🍜 (@cprkrn) May 13, 2026
BTCRecover, a known wallet recovery tool, is designed for cases where users already know most of a wallet password or seed but need help testing variations. Its documentation says it supports Bitcoin Core wallet recovery, among several other wallet types.
The story quickly spread across crypto and AI circles, with many pointing out that Claude did not “break” Bitcoin’s security. Instead, it helped the user sort through old files, understand what had gone wrong, and recover access using valid wallet data.
Still, for anyone with old hard drives lying around, it is also a brutal reminder: your forgotten files could be worth more than you think.
Cprkrn even said he plans on naming his child after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, which seems like a fair deal considering he’s now around $400,000 richer.