Claude Cracks Bitcoin Wallet Password After 11 Years – Saves $400,000

Anyone who forgets the password to a crypto wallet has bad cards. The digital wallet can only be unlocked and the cryptocurrency contained therein accessed using the password. Accordingly, there have been repeated cases in recent years in which wallet owners who had forgotten their password had to look for help in order to access their money. This is what happened to an X user.

Claude cracks Bitcoin wallet

The user with the nickname “cprkrn” last opened his crypto wallet around eleven years ago. When he was a student, he purchased five Bitcoins worth $250 each. Today they are worth more than $400,000. At that time, however, he consumed drugs and changed the password to his Bitcoin wallet while intoxicated. Since then he has not been able to remember which password gives him access to the money.

According to “cprkrn”, he has made several attempts to gain access to the wallet in recent years. To do this, he used, among other things, the open source tool btcrecover, which tries out passwords using the brute force method. More than 3.5 trillion passwords are said to have been tried – without success.

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In desperation, the Bitcoin owner finally turned to Anthropic’s AI Claude. He gave the chatbot all the data from an old laptop that he had used to access the wallet. He had also found a mnemonic that pointed to a password that was used before the change. Claude was able to find an old wallet file on the laptop that could be decrypted using the mnemonic.

In a summary by Claude, the AI emphasizes that wallet private keys never change, only the encryption around them once a password is changed. The old password allowed the AI to discover an error that caused the passwords to be incorrectly assigned to the private key. After this was fixed, btcrecover could be used again and the password could ultimately be cracked. The whole operation cost around $15 in computing power.

This article was originally published on May 18, 2026, but is still of interest to many of our readers. That’s why we’ve updated it and made it available again here.