Claude was able to help this man crack his Bitcoin wallet password

[fillippone]

There are so many wrong practices in this story; I actually hope it's all been fabricated.
Storing passwords in plain text on a PC, forgetting them, and storing yours in an LLM both sound like incredibly stupid things to do.

[TedMosby]

This news is good news and bad news at the same time. For people with the same problem as @cprkrn, AI gives them hope. I'm sure many people will do the same thing after that post by @cprkrn went viral. There are millions of wallets inactive for more than a decade because the wallets are locked due to users forgetting passwords or missing private keys.

But this news is also raising concerns about AI being able to solve this easily. Because if we do this online, it means we will give them all the credentials we have. Not to mention, it can also become new training data for AI. If in the future BTC wallets get cracked successfully by AI before quantum computers do it, I will not be surprised.

But overall, I personally am happy about this news. It's like welcoming back old friends.

BTW, some people may start thinking about buying BTC wallets with forgotten passwords now

[snowpega]

I am not technical but he's run some script or prompt on claude with some of his files from that wallet I guess.

The process has also been posted on that tweet. The tool btcrecover did the job through claude, cmiiw.

As for checking the address, he moved all of his recovered btc already.

Thank you for giving me some hints regarding this matter. Today, I got another thread in the same section that was created by Dictator69. He covered the whole story in a more easy way, and I understand now how that person found his lost BTC and what technique he used. You can also read this thread for better understanding....>> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5583065.0

Now, the more concerning thing is whether we are safe in this time of AI, where I suspect that the pros of AI have started to overcome its cons. Also, that is the reason I started to believe that we should limit the use of AI and only use it when it is too much needed, otherwise not. Now you may be wondering why I am saying this here. You can also read my response in that thread to have a better idea of my point of view. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5583065.msg66726418#msg66726418 And once you read my response, then also share your point of view, what do you think about this?

[uchegod-21]

This news is good news and bad news at the same time. For people with the same problem as @cprkrn, AI gives them hope. I'm sure many people will do the same thing after that post by @cprkrn went viral. There are millions of wallets inactive for more than a decade because the wallets are locked due to users forgetting passwords or missing private keys.

But this news is also raising concerns about AI being able to solve this easily. Because if we do this online, it means we will give them all the credentials we have. Not to mention, it can also become new training data for AI. If in the future BTC wallets get cracked successfully by AI before quantum computers do it, I will not be surprised.

But overall, I personally am happy about this news. It's like welcoming back old friends.

BTW, some people may start thinking about buying BTC wallets with forgotten passwords now

I share the same fears as yours. If all of this is true, scammers will have another easy means of scamming people.

Another thought that came to my mind is that there is no way AI would have done this alone effortlessly. There is no way it could have cracked the password out of nowhere without any clue from the owner. What AI must have done here is random guessing using the information or clues presented to it. To me, guessing it correctly is all luck and not something people should rely on.

That being said, people should be careful about how they try this out. They must still secure their passwords properly and maintain good security practices.

[macson]

The fact that he fed Claude so much information like his notes, old college data, emails, and everything, explains that Claude was analyzing all of that information and finding patterns in the information he was feeding it that allowed him to guess the password. So it wasn't a magic tool. Claude was simply speeding up the process of analyzing patterns in the passwords he was creating. I found this to be a very cool thing that Claude was able to do it.

But it wasn't as scary as people thought, because Claude was essentially just doing what a human could do manually, only much faster. Still, it wouldn't be able to crack Bitcoin private keys, as people feared.

[pawanjain]

Claude is impressive, no doubt about that. Making AI agents do things with just simple prompts is a never seen before thing for many.
But the title looks like Claude was able to crack bitcoin private key while it was just able to decrypt a password whose information the author had already provided to Claude.
These are two separate things and should be clearly mentioned and clearly understood by the people.
There's no "bitcoin privatekey cracking" method yet.

[tread93]

There is this comment by an influencer saying "regeneration of keys", https://x.com/infospace_og/status/2054630528398053531, he has more than 90k followers that will be reading the false post.

Just for clearance, this was decryption of password to the wallet and it's not regeneration of keys like he said.

Most likely this could be the next trend and probably those who have lost their password or have the partial password or seed phrase might used this kind of brute force attack using Claude

This depend on characters encrypted for the password. From his post, the right password is lol420fuckthePOLICE!* that's 25 characters and with 7 trillion guess. Now imagine how many trials it would have to loop for more characters. It wil likely take more time and more difficulty.

Security wise, this is not a good option, Bitcoin private keys, seed phrase or encrypted password are sensitive that can be stolen by anyone. Just because it's AI doesn't mean it's safe. They aren't even safe when it involves privacy and security.

He was smart to spent the Bitcoin before he posted that, smart move but Claude now has the attention.

Yeah that was actually kind of crazy that Claude was able to help him do this. And what a nice get after so long not having access. AI is getting kind of crazy good like super quick! Wild times to be living in here.

[Patikno]

Just being lucky or it really all about AI?

There has been a buzz lately that a user lost his password to a wallet that has 5 BTC in it.

But after feeding everything to Claude, the AI was able to crack the password. Most likely this could be the next trend and probably those who have lost their password or have the partial password or seed phrase might used this kind of brute force attack using Claude

As far as I know, AI stores user-entered data, and that is how it improves its analytical capabilities. So, I asked, "Wouldn't inputting sensitive data into AI be problematic?", and "Wouldn't it be better not to reuse a wallet that has already been input into AI?"

Well, I don't know if I am being overly skeptical or what, but I would avoid using AI to input my sensitive data. Isn't it possible, that AI might reveal our data someday?.

Please, those who understand this, please discuss it, and correct me if I am wrong.

Furthermore, I believe that over time, AI could be misused by criminals to steal other people wallets, especially if it has a few passphrases, that can be used for brute-force attacks. Therefore, I urge you to keep your wallets confidential and refrain from using AI to recover your wallets. Even, if you want to recover your wallet, you can directly use Btcrecover (without using AI or third parties), like @ABCbits said.

Just being lucky or it really all about AI?

Based on that X post, it's all about using btcrecover in correct/efficient manner. I don't recommend people to trust 3rd party (AI or anything else), when you could just download and run btcrecover on your device. IMO that X user should also thank developer of btcrecover.

I would like to add, that we should use it offline.

[HeatBit]

It's all on the news now, everybody knows about it, I believe this is 💯 genuine

A friend just texted me about it too.



I came on the forum to look out if someone already talked about it, so that I won't repeat the same, and here we are, I am pretty happy for this person, he is one lucky person.

[Faisal2202]

So what this 'AI' did was to look through his HDD and find either files or strings of characters that look like passwords and tried them out.  This is not impossible recovery with a human brain that AI was able to turn possible, it is in fact some thing I and any other more experienced person could definitely also do on their own.

Hell.  I would argue it is in fact WAY more secure to do this on your own.  If someone asked Bitcoin Talk to help them out in finding relevant files on their old HDD, I am more than sure they would have had the same result.  Minus dumping their personal drive in a server.

So sharing such files here is better than sharing it on Claude? I don't know how you would judge me, but I think I would go with Claude here. I know they are keeping a record of what I will share with them, and there is no chance that they won't use it to train me. But if I am new here and not aware of Bitcointalk, then I don't think I would trust sharing my files here. Although the files were around 1 GB, which Claude processed, and the .dat file he detected was overlooked by the owner, this was a human error.

But the emails and notes he shared to create a pattern of words that were then fed into the BTC recover tool to create a password is really smart work, I think. He paid nothing except the credits for Claude and saved himself from huge expenses. You are right that we should not share everything with AI, but in this case he said “fuck it,” let’s do it, which means he did not care about the stuff he had and dumped everything into Claude. So basically, he knew he was not risking more than what was on the line here.

[taufik123]

Just being lucky or it really all about AI?

Based on that X post, it's all about using btcrecover in correct/efficient manner. I don't recommend people to trust 3rd party (AI or anything else), when you could just download and run btcrecover on your device. IMO that X user should also thank developer of btcrecover.

P.S. I'm assuming X post doesn't lie or hide any important fact.

If btcrecover opened on the device can do this, then what is the actual function when the AI executes it?
Whether there is a possibility that the seed phrase could be misused by AI or btcrecover developers, I see this as the first case after years of BTC Wallet being locked.

[ABCbits]

So what this 'AI' did was to look through his HDD and find either files or strings of characters that look like passwords and tried them out.  This is not impossible recovery with a human brain that AI was able to turn possible, it is in fact some thing I and any other more experienced person could definitely also do on their own.

Hell.  I would argue it is in fact WAY more secure to do this on your own.  If someone asked Bitcoin Talk to help them out in finding relevant files on their old HDD, I am more than sure they would have had the same result.  Minus dumping their personal drive in a server.

So sharing such files here is better than sharing it on Claude? I don't know how you would judge me, but I think I would go with Claude here. I know they are keeping a record of what I will share with them, and there is no chance that they won't use it to train me. But if I am new here and not aware of Bitcointalk, then I don't think I would trust sharing my files here. Although the files were around 1 GB, which Claude processed, and the .dat file he detected was overlooked by the owner, this was a human error.

I think you misunderstood @PrivacyG statement. You could ask how to find wallet file on HDD rather than giving stranger access to your HDD or upload whole HDD data to the internet.

Just being lucky or it really all about AI?

Based on that X post, it's all about using btcrecover in correct/efficient manner. I don't recommend people to trust 3rd party (AI or anything else), when you could just download and run btcrecover on your device. IMO that X user should also thank developer of btcrecover.

P.S. I'm assuming X post doesn't lie or hide any important fact.

If btcrecover opened on the device can do this, then what is the actual function when the AI executes it?
Whether there is a possibility that the seed phrase could be misused by AI or btcrecover developers, I see this as the first case after years of BTC Wallet being locked.

News shared by other member on earlier post already answer our question.

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.

The problem has always been that most recovery work requires technical expertise that the average lost-bitcoin owner does not have.

That is where AI assistants can step in. Instead of manually sorting through folders, timestamps, and backup files across years of accumulated drive clutter, owners can hand the search to an LLM and have it identify patterns, narrow the search space, and surface candidate files.

I don't say the AI is useless, but some people and media make exaggerated claim about AI actual role/capability.

[Synchronice]

But after feeding everything to Claude, the AI was able to crack the password. Most likely this could be the next trend and probably those who have lost their password or have the partial password or seed phrase might used this kind of brute force attack using Claude

A great marketing for Claude. By the way, I wonder which AI model it was, Claude's Sonnet 4.6 or Opus 4.7? Also, as they say, right now, ChatGPT 5.5 is superior compared to Opus.
Anyways, I think that this will create another good opportunity for scammers. They'll create websites where they'll claim that their AI agent is specially trained for cracking Bitcoin wallet passwords and lots of people will upload wallet files and pay money to them. Or some even might claim that they are using Claude Opus, Gemini plus and ChatGPT 5.5 model for more successful cracking.

What this person did is stupidity and nothing else. He could download btcrecover and do everything himself.

[PrivacyG]

There are so many wrong practices in this story; I actually hope it's all been fabricated.
Storing passwords in plain text on a PC, forgetting them, and storing yours in an LLM both sound like incredibly stupid things to do.

And then even congratulating Claude for finding the same thing that could be found by simply looking through the HDD files.  Yes, this is a story so stupid it sounds like bad advertisement for Claude.

-----

So sharing such files here is better than sharing it on Claude?

No.  I said asking Bitcoin Talk for help, not dumping the entire HDD on Bitcoin Talk.

[Lucius]

~snip~
What this person did is stupidity and nothing else. He could download btcrecover and do everything himself.

Obviously he couldn't because you need to have something in your head for that, and it's much easier to ask AI. This is just another situation that shows how an individual can appear stupid in front of the world without even realizing it.

[Dr.Bitcoin_Strange]

This could be true or not, maybe this person never completely lost access to their wallet and they just did this to bring the AI to limelight and then who knows what it will do at the end of the day, (am just say tho), nothing is impossible these days. There are a lot of people that forgot their password too, if they can use this AI to gain back access to their Bitcoin that they considered lost, then I can agree that this is real.

[Cricktor]

Some people are just too scatterbrained. They have chaos in their head, lack of proper documentation with their crypto stuff and passwords and whatnotelse. They think "I can't forget this and that". Well, give it some time and it's almost guaranteed, they will forget what they don't document. I have first hand experience with that. If you don't learn from your mistakes, desaster will be your companion, especially in the crypto coin space.

If you need an AI to manage your mess, hit pause and reconsider your life setup.

I don't neglect that AI can be a valuable tool, used wisely. Just pay attention what data you hand over to a public AI. What you hand over, you forfeit your control over such data. If this is what you want, fine.

[memehunter]

I recently heard about 'claude mythos' and thought this was related to that. That was the AI model claude is marketing as cyber threat.

AI was able to crack the password.

This is not password cracking but helping/assisting in getting to already stored password. This is not a big deal IMO.

[Faisal2202]

I think you misunderstood @PrivacyG statement. You could ask how to find wallet file on HDD rather than giving stranger access to your HDD or upload whole HDD data to the internet.

Yes I misunderstood him, that's exactly what he meant.

No.  I said asking Bitcoin Talk for help, not dumping the entire HDD on Bitcoin Talk.

Oh I thought you were talking about sharing files.

But guys, if he has been trying every single thing, he must have asked this from AI too its not like we (Bitcointalk members) would have said anything unique than the AI would have said. Finding dat file is easy though but he did not even know that file existed so maybe he just had enough and dumped everything on it.

[taufik123]

I don't say the AI is useless, but some people and media make exaggerated claim about AI actual role/capability.

Ok2, I understand, overestimation will indeed create a belief that the AI can hack or unlock a wallet that has forgotten its password.
So it would be FOMO about Bitcoin forgetting the key.

About excessive claims usually depends on what they see.
AI is an assistant and requires input from humans, so these kinds of inputs used to break into banks are the most prohibited.