A Bitcoin owner has become an online sensation after claiming to have regained access to approximately $400,000 in BTC from a wallet that had been locked for over a decade, using Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude.
A Bitcoin owner has become an online sensation after claiming to have regained access to approximately $400,000 in BTC from a wallet that had been locked for over a decade, using Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude.
A user under the nickname Cprkrn on the X network shared this incredible story of recovering crypto assets on May 13. He said that it was Claude who helped him regain access to 5 bitcoins after many years of unsuccessful attempts, Dexerto writes .
“Oh my god, Claude just figured this shit out!” he wrote in a viral post, thanking Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at around $79,600, making the value of the recovered 5 BTC approximately $398,000.
HOLY FUCKING SHIT OMG CLAUDE JUST CRACKED THIS SHIT, THANK YOU @AnthropicAI THANK YOU @DarioAmodei NAMING MY KID AFTER YOU 😍 https://t.co/gObNirRDpS https://t.co/ByTdIM4d20 pic.twitter.com/xB5LUJb6Pe
— 🍜 (@cprkrn) May 13, 2026
According to the discussion thread, the wallet had been locked since the user's college days. He said he initially bought the cryptocurrency when it was around $250 per coin, but lost access after changing his password while under the influence of drugs.
As it later turned out in the post, the password was: "lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)".
The man claims he spent years trying to get his money back, going through trillions of possible password combinations, but it wasn't until he uploaded files from his old student computer to Claude that he finally got the breakthrough.
Instead of simply guessing the password, Claude helped analyze old files and found an old wallet.dat file that was likely created before the password was changed. The user also had an old seed phrase that helped unlock the wallet once the required file was found.
BTCRecover, a well-known wallet recovery tool, is designed specifically for cases where users know most of the password or seed phrase but need help verifying different combinations. According to the documentation, it supports recovery of Bitcoin Core wallets, as well as a number of other wallet types.
The story quickly spread among cryptography and AI experts, with many noting that Claude did not “crack” Bitcoin’s security system. Instead, he helped the user organize old files, understand the cause of the problem, and restore access using existing valid wallet data.
However, for anyone with old hard drives lying around, this is a harsh reminder: your forgotten files may be worth a lot more than you think.
Cprkrn even said he plans to name his child after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, which seems like a fair deal considering he's now $400,000 richer.
