A user recovered 5 BTC from an old wallet with Claude

The model found an earlier wallet backup, matched it with an old phrase and helped with recovery

Jin SamurayMay 14, 2026 at 11:40 AM

X user @cprkrn said on May 13 that he recovered access to an old Bitcoin wallet with 5 BTC using Claude. According to his posts, the wallet had been locked for about 11 years after a second password change.
At the time of publication, the recovered funds were worth about $395,000. Crypto Briefing writes that after restoring access, the owner moved the coins out of the old address into a new wallet.
The author said he had tried trillions of password guesses, found an old mnemonic phrase and, as a last attempt, uploaded files from his old college computer into Claude.
Bitcoin.com News reports that Claude analyzed the old files, found an earlier wallet backup and matched it with the phrase the owner had found in old notes.
Claude then found a problem in the way btcrecover handled a Blockchain.com second password, fixed the order of sharedKey and password concatenation, and helped extract private keys in WIF format.
After the recovery, @cprkrn tagged Anthropic and Dario Amodei, thanked them, and wrote that he would name his kid after Amodei.
Anthropic's help center says chat and coding-session data may be used to improve Claude if the user allows it, and conversations can also be reviewed for safety. Private keys, recovery phrases and full device archives do not belong in a regular chat.
Lost-wallet recoveries are not new. In 2024, researchers helped a wallet owner recover access to 43.6 BTC through a flaw in an old RoboForm version.

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