After 11 years, AI Claude cracks Bitcoin wallet password worth $400,000

A user with the nickname 'cprkrn' had not opened his crypto wallet for about eleven years. During his student days, he bought five Bitcoin worth $250 each, which today are worth more than $400,000. However, after consuming drugs, he changed his wallet password in a daze and could never remember it again. Over the years, he tried to regain access using the open-source tool btcrecover, which attempts passwords via brute force, but more than 3.5 trillion passwords were tried without success. In desperation, he turned to Anthropic's AI Claude, providing it with all the data from his old laptop and a mnemonic hint that pointed to a password used before the change. Claude found an old wallet file on the laptop that could be decrypted with that hint. The AI explained that private keys never change, only the encryption around them when a password is changed. Using the old password, Claude discovered an error where passwords were incorrectly mapped to the private key. After fixing this, btcrecover could be used again and the password was finally cracked, costing only about $15 in computing power.