Investor recovers $395K in Bitcoin after Claude cracks decade-old wallet lockout

Claude located an archived wallet file that matched a mnemonic phrase he had rediscovered weeks earlier in an old notebook.

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Add us on Google by Vivian Nguyen May. 13, 2026

A longtime Bitcoin holder has regained access to about 5 BTC after being locked out of his wallet for 11 years. The key tool in the recovery was Claude, the AI assistant built by Anthropic.

In a statement posted on X on Wednesday, the investor, known as @cprkrn, said he was locked out after forgetting a password that was changed during a drunken night at college.

“Made really complicated passwords on blockchain.info, I had two out of the three, couldn’t figure out the third. Kind of like a forced hold,” he said in an interview. “I would have sold this thing anyway, let’s just like wait till it’s 100k or a little more.”

As the crypto holder searched for a way back into the wallet, he exhausted roughly 7 trillion password combinations through manual attempts and brute-force software. None of them worked.

Fortune eventually turned in his favor when he fed old college notes and laptop files to Claude, which identified the missing link between an archived wallet file and a partially incomplete seed phrase.

“Opened up Claude and just started dumping all the files from that laptop into it. It ended up finding this old wallet file and then connected that seed phrase for the old password to it, decrypted it, and it successfully worked,” he said.

Bought for $200 at a Starbucks in 2013, the Bitcoin stash is now valued at over $395,000 at current prices.

On-chain data shows the investor transferred his holdings out of the old wallet into Hyperunit after restoring access.

Best part is the password was:

lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

— 🍜 (@cprkrn) May 13, 2026

The wallet recovery case is part of a growing trend of AI being applied to crypto access.

Elsewhere, some individuals are exploring attempts to infer Satoshi Nakamoto’s private keys, an approach widely considered impractical and viewed with ethical concern.

A user has developed a live vibe-coded tool aimed at similar key-searching efforts, targeting roughly 1.1 million Bitcoin valued at about $87 billion.

This is wild.

Someone vibe coded a live tool to try and guess Satoshi's private keys and gain access to $130 billion in Bitcoin.https://t.co/qZ6CPCZbB0 pic.twitter.com/2Pzhu2iUfJ

— Mark Gadala-Maria (@markgadala) April 30, 2026

Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.