WTF?! It's quite rare that we hear positive stories about AI, but at least one person is thankful for the proliferation of LLMs. A Bitcoin owner who forgot their wallet password 11 years ago just used Claude AI to access their cryptocurrency – all $400,000 worth.
An X user with the handle cprkrn writes that he was locked out of his wallet over 11 years ago because he got stoned, changed his password, and forgot it.
A few weeks ago, cprkrn found an old mnemonic that turned out to be for his previous password. Disheartened, he turned to AI for help, dumping his entire college computer into Claude.
Anthropic's AI discovered that an old wallet file from December 2019 was the missing piece. It reportedly contained the private keys needed to access the Blockchain.com wallet holding 5 BTC, bought back in 2015 when Bitcoin was around $250. Those coins had been sitting untouched since April of that year before finally being moved this week.
The user said he had been trying to brute-force his way back in using btcrecover, an open-source Bitcoin wallet recovery tool, and had tested an absurd number of combinations. Claude's own summary of the effort put the figure at 3.5 trillion password attempts, none of which were enough on their own.
– 🍜 (@cprkrn) May 13, 2026
The breakthrough came after the old mnemonic matched addresses linked to one particular wallet file. Claude then found an older backup and spotted a bug in the password configuration that meant the shared key and candidate passwords were not being combined properly. Once that was corrected, the wallet could be decrypted.
The ecstatic X post celebrating the recovery thanked Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei, with cprkrn (maybe) joking that he would name his kid after the latter. Given that the alternative was leaving nearly $400,000 trapped forever because of a password created while high, the reaction seems understandable.
– 🍜 (@cprkrn) May 13, 2026
The story is one of those rare AI anecdotes that does not involve job losses, hallucinations, copyright lawsuits, or an agent deleting a production database. It is also a reminder that plenty of early Bitcoin fortunes remain out of reach because humans are very good at losing passwords, hard drives, and notebooks.
Five Bitcoin is a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to the 8,000 BTC, worth around $647 million, that James Howells famously lost when his hard drive was accidentally sent to a landfill filled with 1.4 million tons of waste. A court prevented him from searching the location last year, and he's still trying to buy the site.
The vast majority of time, AI is beneficial to society. AI has helped me at work do things technically difficult and something I would've needed to rely on a contractor to do (which we never would've hired). And my sister who is the only person in her position at a small company is taking a leave of absence, but had set up Claude to regularly draft emails for action items she needs to take care of while she's gone (on her own, with no technical know-how). Whenever she can work, she just reviews the emails, adjusts language as needed, and hits send. The fact that he isn't aware that these kinds of anecdotes dominate AI usage means he has probably never used AI lol.
