Is Claude AI the key to recovering forgotten Bitcoin wallets?

An X user, Cprkrn, who posted on May 13, 2026, claimed that claude.ai just helped him crack the password to his old digital wallet. He tagged Anthropic and said he would name his kid after its CEO, Dario Amodei.

The post got millions of views within hours, and the story behind it was even better than the announcement. Cprkrn bought Bitcoin back in his college days, when each coin was around $250, and changed the password to his wallet but forgot it completely. He then spent the next 11+ years trying to recover it. 

He later revealed the password publicly as “lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)” and said he had been locked out of $398,000 by a friend’s ideas of a secure password. 

Cprkrn said he had spent years trying to reclaim the password and worked through trillions of potential combinations. He adopted popular tools BTCRecover (an open-source Bitcoin wallet recovery software) and Hashcat, which scans billions of potential passwords quickly, to no avail.

The breakthrough came when Cprkrn decided to upload the files from his old computer into Claude and asked it for help. Instead of breaking the lock, Claude discovered an old wallet.dat file Cprkrn had forgotten existed. A wallet.dat file is the file that Bitcoin Core (the original Bitcoin software) uses to store your wallet.

The software always creates a backup of your old password every time you change it. Cprkrn had a mnemonic phrase (a string of words that functions as the master key to a wallet) written down somewhere. Once Claude combined the phrase with the older wallet file, the original password became accessible.

“It found an OLD wallet file that the mnemonic successfully decrypted. Locked out 11+ years because I got stoned and changed the password. Ended up being the most obvious opening ever lol,” Cprkrn said.

He also shared a screenshot in the X post showing Claude running multiple commands in a terminal window. Claude checked BTCRecover’s actual decryption algorithm, ran the decrypt with what it described as “sharedKey + password concatenated,” and then posted a line in capital letters:

“PRIVATE KEYS DECRYPTED! Let me convert to WIF format and verify addresses:

A few lines later, followed by: “WE GOT IT!!! THE 5 BTC IS YOURS!”

Cprkrn was now about $400,000 richer than he had been that morning. Some people online assumed Claude had somehow broken Bitcoin’s encryption or guessed the password, while others (mostly on Reddit) said the AI just ran a file search.

According to a recovery expert, Claude did not break Bitcoin’s encryption but rather analyzed historical data.

What was the response online, and what does it say about how people see AI?

Thousands of comments poured in on a Reddit thread, with some mocking the user for spending 11 years trying to crack the code instead of just searching his own files. 

But one commenter, called irritatedellipses, countered the criticism, saying there are things one has to know before even considering looking into their old files. 

“To some folks, not searching for an old wallet file with a key phrase in it is a moronic move, but break down the pieces of information you have to have to know to do that: You have to know that wallets store that info. You have to know that it’s readable by some utility. You have to know that old wallets aren’t just deleted with a new one or whatever, they’re .bak’d or what have you,” they said.

Some Reddit users even questioned the story’s authenticity, while others looked back on their own Bitcoin regrets.

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