AI chatbot Claude helps man recover 5 Bitcoin after finding old seed phrase

A Bitcoiner’s post has gone viral on X after he claimed to use Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude to recover five Bitcoin worth about $320,000 that he had been unable to access for more than a decade. 

In an interview with MTS on Wednesday, pseudonymous X user Cprkrn said he created "really complicated passwords" on blockchain.info and forgot one of three passwords after changing it several years ago.

Over the last eight weeks, Cprkrn said he used AI to attempt to brute force "trillions of passwords," but to no avail.

Then, in a “last-ditch effort” earlier this week, Cprkrn said he gathered all of his old college notebooks as well as a laptop he had used into Claude, which helped him recover an old password and a crucial wallet backup file that corresponded with that password, ultimately enabling him to access the Bitcoin wallet.

Source: Cprkrn

Industry reports estimate that between 2.3 million and 4 million Bitcoin (BTC) are inaccessible, representing about 11% to 19% of the cryptocurrency’s maximum supply because of forgotten or lost seed phrases, burned coins or other reasons. There are entire businesses dedicated to helping cryptocurrency users recover lost coins. 

How Cprkrn used Claude to recover his Bitcoin

Cprkrn’s seed phrase hunt was conducted over eight weeks, with Claude helping him search two Macs, two external hard drives, an Apple Notes export, iCloud Mail, a Gmail inbox and X messages, totaling more than 1 gigabyte of data.

One of those devices was his college computer, on which Claude discovered a critical wallet backup file from December 2019.

From there, Cprkrn, with Claude’s assistance, managed to decrypt the file using a password derived from a notebook mnemonic, enabling him to find the seed phrase for the long-dormant Bitcoin wallet. 

While Cprkrn didn’t provide direct evidence of Claude searching through his devices, he shared a link from Blockchain.com’s Bitcoin explorer showing that about 5 Bitcoin was transferred from wallet address “14VJy…ofuE6” across five transactions on May 13. 

Prior to those transactions, the coins had been dormant since early 2015. 

Over 3.5 trillion passwords were tested before succeeding

The recovery came after Claude unsuccessfully used BTCRecover — an open-source seed recovery tool — and the software program Python to test around 34 billion passwords with brute force.

Related: Bitcoin whale 'still short' BTC despite facing $13M in losses 

Claude also used password recovery tool Hashcat to test another 3.4 trillion passwords, which also proved unsuccessful.

Just $15 in AI compute was used to conduct the searches and test passwords, according to Claude’s summary of the recovery efforts.

Source: Cprkrn

Despite the success, some members of the crypto community said Cprkrn overstated Claude’s role in retrieving the Bitcoin, arguing that it only assisted with the searching efforts and didn’t crack the wallet as Cprkrn suggested.

“Claude didn't do anything other than search his files,” Reddit user MeteorSwarmGallifrey said in the technology subreddit, adding that Claude didn’t do anything “groundbreaking.”

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