Claude AI Recovers $400K Bitcoin Wallet Lost for 11 Years — Digital Forensics, Not Cryptographic Cracking

Tom's Hardware / CoinDesk / Hacker News·medium signal

A Bitcoin trader recovered ~$400,000 (5 BTC) from a wallet locked since 2014 using Anthropic's Claude, after failing to brute-force 3.5 trillion password combinations over eight weeks. Claude's actual contribution was forensic: it analyzed old wallet files, located a pre-password-change backup, and identified a bug in btcrecover that was concatenating a shared key with the password in the wrong order. Recovery experts confirmed this was file analysis and bug identification, not cryptographic breaking — despite viral claims otherwise.