A user regained access to 5 BTC considered lost thanks to Anthropic’s artificial intelligence, which identified an old wallet.dat file.
On May 13, 2026, X user Cprkrn published a post that was destined to go viral: Anthropic’s Claude AI had helped him recover access to a Bitcoin wallet worth approximately $398,000, after more than 11 years of failed attempts. The post gathered millions of views within hours, and the user tagged Anthropic, jokingly declaring he wanted to name his son after CEO Dario Amodei.
The story begins during college, when Cprkrn purchased Bitcoin at around $250 per coin. He later changed the wallet password and forgot it entirely. The password, publicly revealed after the recovery, was “lol420fuckthePOLICE!:)”* – coined by a friend with the idea of making it secure. For over a decade, the user had attempted to recover it through specialized tools such as BTCRecover, an open-source software for Bitcoin wallet recovery, and Hashcat, capable of scanning billions of potential combinations, all without success.
The breakthrough came when Cprkrn uploaded files from his old computer to Claude and asked for assistance. The AI did not break Bitcoin’s encryption or guess the password: instead, it identified an old wallet.dat file that the user had completely forgotten about. The wallet.dat file is the format used by Bitcoin Core to store wallet data, and the software automatically creates a backup with every password change. Cprkrn still had a mnemonic phrase written down somewhere. By combining the mnemonic phrase with the old wallet file, the funds became accessible once again.
