Key Takeaways
A Bitcoin holder has recovered 5 BTC, worth approximately $398,000, from a wallet locked since 2013 after using Anthropic's Claude AI to sort through files on an old college computer. The user, posting as cprkrn on X, successfully regained access after more than 11 years of failed attempts.
"Last ditch effort dumped my whole college computer into Claude. It found an OLD wallet file that the pneumonic successfully decrypted," cprkrn posted on X, tagging Anthropic and its CEO. The post, which drew over a million views, was called "insane" by Castle Island Ventures partner Nic Carter and crypto journalist Laura Shin.
The user had previously spent years and paid for commercial services in unsuccessful attempts to access the wallet. The breakthrough came when Claude analyzed a dump of old computer files, located an encrypted wallet file, and debugged the open-source recovery tool btcrecover. According to screenshots, the AI identified how the tool concatenated a shared key with the user's password, allowing the mnemonic phrase—rediscovered weeks earlier—to finally decrypt the keys.
The event serves as a high-profile proof-of-concept for AI's utility in complex digital forensics, moving beyond typical coding and content generation tasks. While the recovery of one wallet does not directly impact Bitcoin's market dynamics, it highlights a potential solution for the millions of BTC believed to be permanently lost in dormant wallets, which Glassnode data suggests holds nearly a third of the total supply.
Unlike traditional recovery methods that rely on brute-forcing trillions of password combinations, Claude's success came from its ability to reason through unstructured data. The AI acted as a digital archaeologist, connecting fragmented inputs including notebook scribbles and multiple file dumps across different sessions. It identified an older wallet.dat file that predated a password change, a detail human-led efforts had missed. This forensic analysis, rather than cryptographic cracking, was the key to unlocking the funds.
The recovery adds to a growing list of novel applications for large language models, demonstrating their value as reasoning partners for specialized problems. For Anthropic, it represents a significant, if unintentional, marketing win as its Claude model competes with rivals from Google and OpenAI. The story resonates with a core crypto ethos of long-term holding, as an initial investment of roughly $1,000 (5 BTC at ~$200 each in 2013) transformed into nearly $400,000.
The recovery occurred as Bitcoin’s price hovered near $79,600. The market remains volatile, with some analysts like former BitMEX chief Arthur Hayes seeing recent dips as buying opportunities tied to macro pressures from US Treasury yields. Davinci Jeremie, an early Bitcoin advocate, similarly framed recent sell-offs as a "shakeout" that has historically preceded further gains.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
