Claude AI Helps Recover $400K Bitcoin Wallet Forgotten for 11 Years

A Decade-Long Mystery Solved

A Bitcoin trader has successfully recovered a wallet holding approximately $400,000 in Bitcoin with the help of Claude AI — more than 11 years after forgetting the password set during an intoxicated evening.

The Setup: A Password Lost to a Hazy Night

The trader set the wallet password while heavily intoxicated and had no memory of it afterward. Multiple recovery attempts over the years using conventional password tools came up empty. With standard brute-force methods insufficient, the trader turned to AI.

Claude's Methodical Approach

Rather than blind brute-force attacks, Claude systematically gathered the trader's fragmented memories — partial patterns, password habits at the time, contextual clues — and used them to progressively narrow down the candidate space. The AI's understanding of human memory and behavioral tendencies enabled a fundamentally different approach to recovery.

AI as a Personal Vault Cracker

The case highlights an emerging use case for LLMs beyond information retrieval: helping humans recover their own inaccessible assets. Estimates suggest hundreds of thousands of BTC remain locked in forgotten wallets. Whether AI-assisted recovery becomes a category of its own remains to be seen, but this case is a striking proof of concept.