A user known as “Cprkrn” on social media platform X has revealed that he recovered the password for his long-lost digital wallet with the help of Claude, the artificial intelligence chatbot. Sharing his experience on May 13, 2026, he expressed his delight at being reunited with his coins and tagged Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei, adding a humorous note to his post.
Years of searching for lost BTC
Back in his college days, Cprkrn bought Bitcoin (BTC) when the price was just $250. Out of concern for security, he later changed his wallet password but ultimately forgot the new one. Unable to access his coins for nearly 11 years, he was locked out of a wallet containing BTC now valued at $398,000, with the password inexplicably set as “lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:).”
For years after losing the password, Cprkrn tried every possible combination—literally trillions of options—using popular open-source password recovery tools like BTCRecover and Hashcat, but all these attempts failed to crack the code.
How artificial intelligence unlocked the wallet
As a last resort, Cprkrn uploaded old files from a previous computer to Claude AI, hoping for a breakthrough. Instead of brute-forcing the password, Claude shifted approach, locating a forgotten “wallet.dat” file. This file, crucial for Bitcoin Core, securely stores essential wallet data.
Cprkrn had also written down in a sentence a mnemonic phrase, which acts as a master key for crypto wallets. Claude was able to pair this mnemonic with data from the wallet.dat file, which led to the successful recovery of the password and restoration of access to the funds.
Sharing his experience, Cprkrn reflected, “It found an old wallet file and using the mnemonic, we finally cracked it. I was locked out for 11 years because of confusion and changing the password. In the end, the problem was solved in the simplest way possible.”
Cprkrn shared screenshots showing Claude’s command-line operations during the process. The images reveal how Claude analyzed BTCRecover’s algorithm and combined “sharedKey + password” to attempt decryption. Eventually, the terminal displayed “PRIVATE KEYS DECRYPTED! Let me convert to WIF format and verify addresses,” quickly followed by “WE GOT IT!!! THE 5 BTC IS YOURS!” This meant about 5 BTC, worth almost $400,000, was finally unlocked.
The AI impact and social media response
Some social media users sensationally claimed that Claude AI broke Bitcoin’s encryption, but a recovery expert clarified this was inaccurate. Instead, the AI merely analyzed the available data for a solution, rather than bypassing cryptographic security.
The story drew global attention, especially as a Reddit thread about the incident generated thousands of comments. Some joked about the irony of spending years brute-forcing when the solution lay in a forgotten file, while others, such as user “irritatedellipses,” pointed out that not everyone would know to look for such key files or mnemonic phrases.
According to “irritatedellipses,” “Many might think searching for an old wallet file and a mnemonic is common sense, but you have to know what you’re looking for. You need to understand what wallets store, how files are backed up, and more technical details.”
Others questioned the authenticity of the story or were reminded of their own lost crypto. Regardless, the episode shows how powerful AI tools are becoming and hints at new directions in recovering lost cryptocurrency wallets.
