Claude helps recover 5 Bitcoins, post goes viral! But cybersecurity experts: this story has two major blind spots

A netizen used the AI model Claude to recover a wallet sealed away for 11 years and got back five Bitcoins. Although the AI did not crack the password, it helped with digital forensics and filtered key credentials from a massive amount of files, completing the rescue.

Losing a mnemonic phrase and watching a million-dollar fortune vanish right before your eyes is a pain in the hearts of many veteran players in the crypto world. However, in a recently viral post on the social platform X, there was an about-face that feels like a movie. A netizen claims that with the help of the artificial intelligence model Claude, he successfully recovered Bitcoins that had been sealed for nearly 9 years, worth $400,000.

A netizen using the alias “Cprkrn” wrote in a post in astonishment: “Oh my God, Claude actually really did it!” In his post, he not only marked the developer Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei, but also attached an old post from August 2023 to prove that long before that, he had already been trying to crack a wallet that had been “deep-locked” since 2015.

On-chain data also confirms that the Bitcoin address starting with “14VJyS” indeed had no activity for 9 years and only recently came back to the spotlight, successfully transferring out 5 Bitcoins.

This string of posts quickly attracted more than 6,000,000 views, sparking heated discussions among netizens: can large language models really help with tasks like handling encrypted files and recovering forgotten passwords?

• Related news: Lost for 11 years! He used Claude to fix a Bitcoin wallet private key, and the $400k BTC reappeared

However, upon carefully examining the screenshots he shared, there is actually no evidence showing that Claude directly “hacked” through Bitcoin’s unbreakable cryptographic defenses. Instead, the AI acted more like a powerful digital assistant, helping users sort through the tedious process of encrypted file and password recovery.

According to the post, Cprkrn had repeatedly tried to unlock the wallet using btcrecover and Hashcat (two professional software tools often used by cybersecurity personnel to brute-force or test password encryption data), but it was always in vain. Only at the end did he feed Claude the massive amount of files from an old computer from his college days for analysis. Unexpectedly, the AI successfully matched out a wallet file related to the “mnemonic phrase” on his old laptop.

“The wallet was locked for over 11 years, just because back then I smoked weed, and my mind was unclear when I changed the password,” he joked. After the AI found the key file, the mnemonic phrase successfully unlocked the wallet. “And the way it got unlocked—turns out it was a loophole so obvious it’s almost hilarious.”

Even though the person involved praised the AI’s performance, cybersecurity experts specializing in wallet recovery pointed out the blind spot: during the entire unlocking process, how much credit can truly be attributed to Claude? After all, the user already had the wallet file itself, the mnemonic phrase, and the historical information needed to rebuild the password. A cybersecurity expert said:

What Claude is really doing is likely performing large-scale filtering from a huge amount of historical data, and finding clues related to the credentials or password format of the old wallet. Rather than “cracking passwords,” it’s more like doing “digital forensics and data classification.”

The reason this incident drew intense market attention is that last month Anthropic had just released the “Claude Mythos” model, which is positioned as a high-end security offering, and it also touted that the new model can precisely identify software vulnerabilities and automatically complete advanced cybersecurity protection tasks—leading the public to imagine Claude’s ability to handle complex analysis.

However, this wave of “AI myth” was harshly criticized on the community forum Reddit by many rational netizens, who believe the viral post greatly exaggerated the actual contribution of AI in the rescue process. One netizen commented:

Claude didn’t do anything extraordinary at all. It just helped him “search” for the file. These sensational, vague claims can only make gullible people think that AI achieved some great breakthrough.

Another netizen pointed out: “Now you understand why the general public is so crazy about AI, right? This isn’t some technological revolution at all—it just perfectly caters to human laziness from birth.”

In any case, the post did succeed in drawing global attention and once again made the intersection of AI and cryptocurrency a hot topic. However, the truth may be far less sci-fi than the headline suggests.

• This article was republished with authorization from: 《Blockker》
• Original title: 《Claude helps find 5 Bitcoins! The “AI unlocks a sealed wallet” post goes viral, but the truth is…》
• Original author: Blocker Mei MEL