A crypto user said Anthropic’s Claude helped recover private keys to a long-inaccessible Bitcoin wallet holding about 5 BTC, ending an 11-year lockout that began after a forgotten password change.
According to posts shared by the user on X, the wallet had been unreachable since 2015, when he changed the password and later lost track of the correct access details. The user said he had tried “7 trillion passwords” before turning to Claude as a final attempt, feeding the AI system files from an old college computer in search of anything that could help reopen the wallet.
The breakthrough came after Claude located an old wallet file and connected it with a previously found mnemonic phrase that the user said had once worked before the password was changed.
A technical flaw kept the wallet locked
According to the user, the open-source recovery tools were not assembling the password input in the expected order, joining the shared key and password incorrectly and causing the wallet to remain locked even after usable password material had been found.
After reviewing the process, Claude reportedly traced the failure to that sequence and revised the decryption logic so the shared key and password were passed through correctly. The user said the adjusted method decrypted the private keys, converted them into Wallet Import Format, and confirmed they matched the wallet’s addresses.
The wallet, tied to Bitcoin address 14VJySbsKraEJbtwk9ivnr1fXs6QuofuE6, appeared to go dormant after receiving 5 BTC in 2015, with no further movement until the latest transactions following the reported recovery.
A reckless password change and a costly mistake
The user later said the password was a profane phrase that looked almost too obvious once the wallet was finally opened, adding that he had spent about $250 on each earlier recovery attempt before turning to Claude with the contents of his old computer as a last resort.
This case offers a rare reversal in a sector where forgotten passwords often translate into permanent losses. It also suggests AI systems could become useful assistants in technical recovery work, while leaving crypto’s familiar self-custody lesson intact: self-custody gives users full control over their assets, along with the full responsibility for preserving access.