The recovery, reported around May 13-14, 2026, used Anthropic's Claude to analyze old computer files, spot a bug in btcrecover and unlock a wallet after 3.5 trillion failed attempts.
A crypto user known as @cprkrn recovered 5 BTC, worth about $400,000, after being locked out for more than a decade, with Anthropic's Claude AI doing the diagnostic work that led to the fix. The recovery happened around May 13-14, 2026 and quickly spread across X, Tom's Hardware and the Bitcoin Foundation. Claude did not break Bitcoin's cryptography, crack seed phrases or brute-force a wallet remotely. Instead, it analyzed files on @cprkrn's old computer, found an encrypted wallet backup from December 2019 and identified a bug in btcrecover, the open-source recovery tool @cprkrn had used for years. The software had already run through 3.5 trillion password combinations without success because of a flaw in how it combined shared keys and passwords. Once that bug was fixed, the right password combination worked and the wallet opened after 11 years of trying. The episode has been framed as a warning about old laptops and wallet files, but not as a systemic weakness in Bitcoin itself.