Featured Image Credit: UNILAD Tech/ChatGPT
A man recovered access to a Bitcoin wallet worth around $400,000 thanks to AI - after spending more than a decade locked out of it because he changed the "obvious" password while high.
The crypto owner, who posts online as @cprkrn, said he bought 5 Bitcoin back in 2013 for around $250 each before accidentally locking himself out of the wallet.
At the time, Bitcoin was worth only a fraction of what it is today. But with Bitcoin now trading at around $79,622, the forgotten wallet ended up being worth close to $400,000.
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According to the man himself, the entire situation started after he changed the wallet password while stoned during college - and immediately forgot what he changed it to.
After years of failed attempts to get back into the account, he eventually turned to Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude as a “last ditch effort”.
Sharing the story on X, he wrote: “I tried like 7 trillion passwords lmfao.
“Found this old pneumonic a few weeks ago that ended up being the old password before I changed it. Thought I was sc****d.
“Last ditch effort dumped my whole college computer into Claude. It found an OLD wallet file that the pneumonic successfully decrypted.
“Locked out 11+ years because I got stoned and changed the password. Spent $250 on each lol.”
Screenshots posted online appeared to show Claude analysing old recovery files and running wallet recovery tools before successfully decrypting the wallet.
One of the messages shown on-screen read: “WE GOT IT!!! THE 5 BTC IS YOURS!”
After recovering the Bitcoin, @cprkrn posted another reaction online saying: “HOLY FU***** S*** OMG CLAUDE JUST CRACKED THIS S*** THANK YOU @AnthropicAI.”
The man @cprkrn joked he's “naming [his] kid” after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to celebrate.
To back up his claims that the Bitcoin had genuinely been untouched for years, the user also shared an older post from 2023 which included the wallet address and showed the 5 BTC balance sitting inactive long before the recovery happened.
The story has exploded online as people reacted to both the amount of money recovered and the bizarre way it happened.
While some initially thought the AI had “hacked” the wallet, experts say Claude most likely helped organise and analyse old encrypted wallet files, recovery phrases and forgotten data much faster than a human could manually.
Lost Bitcoin wallets have become increasingly common over the years because crypto doesn’t work like a normal bank account.
If someone forgets a wallet password or loses their recovery phrase, there’s usually no password reset option - meaning the funds can effectively disappear forever.
Research has previously suggested millions of Bitcoin may already be permanently lost due to forgotten passwords, damaged hard drives and abandoned wallets.
Fortunately for @cprkrn, this one wasn’t.
