Warning for Bitcoin developers on AI testing

[BlackHatCoiner]

Just for the record for Bitcoin developers who test things with AI:

I was working on a Bitcoin wallet and considered automating my testing with Claude, so I instructed it to test X, Y, and Z on regtest.

It created wallets A, B, C, and D, and ran the tests fine. After it finished, it ran some tests on mainnet as well (because I wanted to test mainnet functionality as well). Without thinking twice, I sent 12k sats to one of those MAINNET wallets.

The funds were drained instantly.

DO NOT ever use an AI-generated wallet for mainnet testing. You will lose your funds. I am not sure what specifically went wrong (it likely generated a deterministic seed phrase that had already been used by others instead of using a secure system RNG).

Under any circumstances, DO NOT use AI for mainnet. Better yet, don't even use it on the same system where you keep your hot wallet.

[Cookdata]

DO NOT ever use an AI-generated wallet for mainnet testing.

Sorry for the loss but was there not a warning like "Do not deposit real Bitcoin into these wallets". If they are confidence in what they built, let it go public and this happened, then the company can be sued.

This is why I never believed the other day when a person posted on X claiming Claude helped him to recover password to his long lock wallet.dat and was able to move his Bitcoin.

[RGBTC]

DO NOT ever use an AI-generated wallet for mainnet testing. You will lose your funds. I am not sure what specifically went wrong (it likely generated a deterministic seed phrase that had already been used by others instead of using a secure system RNG).

I'm reminded of the Morse Code-based Prompt Injection exploit against Grok that ended up draining Bankrbot's wallet^(*). I believe some AIs still have similar vulnerabilities; with a little prompt trickery, anyone can extract all the keys in an AI's documentation, whether self-generated or user-submitted.


*) https://cyberpress.org/steal-200k-from-grok-and-bankrbot/

[hmbdofficial]

This a good warning actually, but I would also be careful about attributing the loss specifically to a “deterministic seed phrase that had already been used.”
I think the most important distinction to note is that an LLM (Large language  model) should never be trusted to generate anything in the like of entropy or key materials in the first place. A seed phrase isn’t just secure because it looks random, but it’s because it security comes from cryptographically secure randomness generated by a trusted CSPRNG (cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator).

If an AI generated wallet used a hard-coded seed, predictable entropy, exposed private key or some other implementation mistakes, that wallet should never have been considered safe for mainnet fund in the first place.

I think if the wallets was generated using proper BIP39 or BIP32 procedures with OS-level CSPRNG entropy and the private key never got leaked your 12k sat would probably have not been drained.

It’s better to use retest/signet for experiments even though AI could help write or test wallet software, I think it’s important to keep security boundaries outside the model.

[Karl_3000]

AI generated wallet? I can not use it.

This is why I never believed the other day when a person posted on X claiming Claude helped him to recover password to his long lock wallet.dat and was able to move his Bitcoin.

With the image the person showed, the person was right, but Claude did not do the work, it was BTCrecover (an application that is well know to people on this forum for coin recovery) that Claude used to recover the coin. But I can not trust Claude with my money, I will prefer to use BTCrecover manually but the person may not know the recovery tool and Claude helped the person with it.

[Antidote47k]

I’m particularly interested whether Claude actually generated the seed phrases itself or it relied on the operating system’s cryptographically secure Random number generator. I don’t think LLMs should be treated as a source of entropy but if the code used a proper CSPRNG then maybe the problem lies elsewhere. I can think of several possibilities but none conclusive, it may be that it reused an example mnemonic, or probably a bug in the generated wallet code or something unintentionally exposed the private key, also did the generated address have any transaction history before you funded it?
If at some point you learn what really happened, I’d really appreciate it if you could update the thread. I believe it will be beneficial for anyone trying out AI and Bitcoin development, as it is significant to know the why as well as the lesson.