A viral X post is claiming Claude 'cracked' a forgotten bitcoin wallet to recover 5 BTC from a user's computer.
But don't get caught in the hype as that is not what happened. Anthropic's AI simply helped the owner search their own computer for an old wallet file, which was then decrypted with a password the owner already had written down in a notebook.
User cprkrn posted the recovery on Wednesday, calling it "the most obvious opening ever" once they figured out what had happened.
The owner had been trying for eight weeks to brute-force the password on their current Blockchain.com wallet, testing roughly 3.5 trillion combinations using the btcrecover service on a rented computing chip.
The recovery happened when the user "dumped my whole college computer into Claude" as a last-ditch effort, and the assistant located an old wallet backup from December 2019 that was encrypted with a password the user already had written down in a notebook.
