A Bitcoin owner named cprkrn on X (Twitter) Chia that he recovered 5 BTC from a wallet locked for over 11 years after uploading old college computer files to Anthropic's Claude AI.
He stated that the chatbot found the encrypted wallet file, fixed the btcrecover open-source tool, decrypted the key, and converted it to Wallet Import Format. Previously, he had paid around $250 for each attempt at commercial services, all of which failed, before deciding to try using AI.
How Claude unlocked his forgotten wallet.
cprkrn recounted that he uploaded all the data from his college computer to Claude in a last-ditch effort. The chatbot found the encrypted wallet file among the uploaded data and then used btcrecover – a popular open-source recovery tool .
Screenshots posted on X show that the AI analyzed and followed the password logic. Claude realized that btcrecover would combine the sharedKey value with the user's password to decrypt. After adjustments, the private key was successfully decrypted on the first try.
The wallet was successfully recovered thanks to a Mnemonics that the user said he found a few weeks ago. He set his original password during his student years and changed it shortly afterward, similar to many cases where crypto assets are stuck for years .
Finally, I had to transfer all my college computer data to Claude. It found an old wallet file, and the mnemonic phrase successfully decrypted it,” cprkrn Chia .
Why is this incident attracting attention?
The post about recovering the wallet garnered over a million XEM in just a few hours. Nic Carter, a partner at Castle Island Ventures, described the result as "crazy." Journalist Laura Shin and Jesse Pollak, founder of Base, had similar reactions.
Experts believe this demonstrates that general-purpose AI is now beginning to handle specialized tasks related to security and vulnerability detection .
In addition, Anthropic has received more attention as Claude's features have been increasingly expanded .
This case adds to the list of instances where assets have been recovered from long-dormant wallets. According to Glassnode data on inactive Bitcoin , approximately one-third of Bitcoin currently remains in wallets that haven't been moved for many years.
Whether this method will help recover other forgotten wallets will depend on whether the wallet owner still has the files from before. cprkrn advises people to upload all data from old devices and notebooks before giving up.
