A Bitcoin holder has successfully recovered access to a wallet containing roughly 5.25 BTC—worth around $400,000 today—after being locked out for more than 11 years, in a story that has gone viral across Crypto Twitter.

According to X user Casper Kirschner (@cprkrn), the wallet became inaccessible around 2015 after he changed the password while in college and immediately forgot it. Years of recovery attempts using traditional tools such as btcrecover failed despite trillions of password combinations being tested.

The breakthrough came after Kirschner uploaded archives, backups, and files from an old college computer into Anthropic’s Claude AI. Rather than “cracking” Bitcoin encryption, Claude reportedly helped identify an older wallet backup, reconstruct recovery information, and detect issues in the recovery workflow that had previously gone unnoticed.

The recovered wallet contained approximately 5.25 BTC originally acquired when Bitcoin traded near $250.

The case has drawn attention as an example of how AI can assist in digital forensics and data recovery by analyzing large amounts of unstructured information. Importantly, neither Bitcoin’s cryptography nor wallet encryption was broken; the recovery relied on locating overlooked backup data and correctly reconstructing access credentials.

The wallet, dormant for more than a decade, reportedly showed on-chain activity shortly after the successful recovery.