A Bitcoin wallet locked since around 2014 just got cracked open. Not by professional hackers. Not by a paid recovery service charging thousands upfront. By an AI chatbot.

The man behind the recovery, X user @cprkrn, posted a thread on May 13 that went viral fast. He had been locked out of his wallet for over 11 years, having changed the password while stoned in college and never written it down correctly. According to @cprkrn on X, he tried roughly 7 trillion password combinations before giving up hope.

The breakthrough came after he found an old mnemonic, what he called a “pneumonic,” tucked away somewhere. The mnemonic pointed to the password he used before changing it. Still, that alone was not enough. He dumped his entire college computer’s data into Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, and asked it to search through everything.

What Claude Actually Found

Claude located an old wallet.dat file buried in the college computer data. The mnemonic the user had found weeks earlier successfully decrypted it. That was the door. Eleven years of locked Bitcoin, opened in one session.

“It ended up being the most obvious opening ever lol, but I would’ve been too dumb to figure it out,” @cprkrn wrote on X, crediting Anthropic directly.

The screenshot shared in the thread shows Claude working through btcrecover commands, identifying a bug in the decryption process where a sharedKey was being concatenated with the password. After correcting it, private keys decrypted. The on-screen message read: “WE GOT IT!!! THE 5 BTC IS YOURS!”

The wallet address 14VJySbsKraEJbtwk9ivnr1fXs6QuofuE6 tells a fuller story. It received a total of 16.95724985 BTC across its lifetime, worth over $1,347,116 at current prices, according to Blockchain.com. Transactions on the address go back to February 2014, the oldest block showing 0.18720000 BTC received from nine inputs.

The wallet went dormant sometime around 2015. Then on May 13, 2026, three outbound transactions fired in rapid succession, moving roughly 5 BTC total within minutes of each other.

Reactions Online

“The fact that you still have your college computer intact is insane,” X user @47atop wrote under the thread.

Others pointed out the spelling. @miamislice on X corrected the “pneumonic” to “mnemonic,” as did @MGlycinate and @georgecursor, though @cprkrn laughed it off. User @stool_sample11 asked for the exact process, specifically whether Claude found the actual password text somewhere on the machine or decrypted the private key directly.

The answer, based on the thread and screenshot, is both. Claude identified the old file, the mnemonic worked as decryption input, and then Claude ran the correct btcrecover algorithm to extract the private keys.

Between 2.3 million and 3.7 million BTC is estimated to be permanently inaccessible, according to Ledger analysts, with forgotten passwords accounting for a significant share. The FBI separately reported over $9.3 billion in crypto-related losses in 2024. This recovery, small in the broader context, shows one direction that AI tools are starting to go with that problem.

@cprkrn spent $250 per attempt across multiple tries before this worked. The original 2023 tweet he referenced showed him noting the locked wallet casually, with no expectation it would ever open.

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT OMG CLAUDE JUST CRACKED THIS SHIT,” he posted, tagging both @AnthropicAI and @DarioAmodei.