For more than a decade, five Bitcoin sat locked inside a forgotten digital wallet, their value quietly climbing from a few hundred dollars per coin into the tens of thousands. The man who owned them had long since resigned himself to the loss. Then, one final attempt with an AI changed everything.
The user, known online as Cprkrn, made waves on May 13 after sharing how he used Anthropic’s Claude to recover access to a Bitcoin wallet he had not been able to open since his college years. With Bitcoin trading around $79,600 at the time, those five coins represent roughly $398,000.
“Holy f**king sh*t omg Claude just cracked this sh*t,” he wrote in the post that quickly spread across crypto and tech communities. He went on to thank Anthropic and the company’s CEO Dario Amodei directly, adding that he was “naming my kid after you.”
The backstory will feel painfully familiar to many long-time crypto holders. Cprkrn had originally purchased the Bitcoin when each coin was trading near $250. At some point during his college years, he changed the wallet password while in an altered state of mind and promptly forgot what he had set it to.
Years of failed recovery attempts followed. He cycled through an enormous number of possibilities using automated tools. “I tried like 7 trillion passwords lmfao,” he wrote. Nothing worked.
The turning point came when Cprkrn rediscovered an old mnemonic phrase from his college days and decided to try one final approach: uploading the entire contents of his old college computer to Claude. Rather than guessing the password, Claude did something more useful. It sorted through the files and identified an older version of the wallet.dat file, one that appeared to exist before the password change was ever made.
“Found this old mnemonic a few weeks ago that ended up being the old password before I changed it. Thought I was screwed. Last ditch effort, dumped my whole college computer into Claude. It found an OLD wallet file that the pneumonic successfully decrypted,” he wrote.
As the story circulated, many observers were quick to note that Claude had not bypassed Bitcoin’s cryptographic security in any technical sense. The AI had instead done what a very thorough research assistant might: analyzed a mountain of old files, identified what mattered, and connected the dots between an old recovery phrase and an earlier wallet file that predated the problematic password change entirely.
As for Cprkrn, he is now roughly $400,000 richer and, apparently, already narrowing down baby names.
