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Claude helps recover $395,000 in bitcoin trapped on a computer for years

The owner had been trying for eight weeks to brute-force the password on their current Blockchain.com wallet, testing roughly 3.5 trillion combinations using the btcrecover service on a rented computing chip.

By Shaurya Malwa

May 14, 2026, 5:34 a.m. 2 min read

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What to know:

• A viral X post claiming that Anthropic’s Claude “cracked” a bitcoin wallet is misleading, as the AI merely helped the owner locate an old wallet backup file on their own computer.
• The wallet was ultimately unlocked using a password the owner had already written down, and the recovered backup contained the same private keys as the current wallet, meaning no bitcoin cryptography was broken.
• The episode highlights how AI assistants can make it easier for nontechnical users to search old devices for forgotten wallet files, potentially unlocking long-lost bitcoin without weakening underlying cryptographic security.

User cprkrn posted the recovery on Wednesday, calling it “the most obvious opening ever” once they figured out what had happened.

The owner had been trying for eight weeks to brute-force the password on their current Blockchain.com wallet, testing roughly 3.5 trillion combinations using the btcrecover service on a rented computing chip.

The recovery happened when the user “dumped my whole college computer into Claude” as a last-ditch effort, and the assistant located an old wallet backup from December 2019 that was encrypted with a password the user already had written down in a notebook.