AI cracks 11-year-old Bitcoin wallet, recovers $400K

A Bitcoin holder used Claude AI to recover 5 BTC from an 11-year-old wallet, unlocking nearly $400,000 after failed manual and commercial recovery attempts.

A Bitcoin holder, known as @cprkrn on X, managed to recover 5 BTC from a wallet that had been inaccessible for over 11 years, thanks to Anthropic’s Claude AI. After years of unsuccessful manual attempts and spending about $250 per try on commercial recovery services, the user turned to Claude as a last resort by uploading old college computer files. Claude AI identified an encrypted wallet file, analyzed the open-source tool btcrecover, and pinpointed a password-processing issue involving the concatenation of a sharedKey and password. Using the correct decryption logic and a recently rediscovered mnemonic phrase, Claude enabled the extraction of private keys and conversion to Wallet Import Format. The recovered Bitcoin, now worth nearly $400,000, demonstrates the growing potential of AI tools in overcoming complex cryptocurrency recovery challenges where traditional methods have failed.