AI Cracks Decade-Old Mystery of Lost Bitcoin

A dramatic recovery of lost Bitcoin has sparked excitement in the crypto community after an AI tool cracked the case that had been unsolved for over a decade.

The tool, Anthropic's Claude AI, didn't break Bitcoin's cryptography but instead analyzed files stored on the user's old computer and identified a critical bug in btcrecover, the open-source recovery tool that had been used for years.

The user, known as @cprkrn, had been trying to recover 5 BTC, worth approximately $400K, since December 2019. Claude AI located an encrypted wallet backup on the old computer and identified the bug in how btcrecover was combining shared keys and passwords.

After 11 years of failed attempts with 3.5 trillion password combinations, the correct password combination finally worked once the bug was fixed. The recovery happened around May 13-14, 2026.