His $400,000 Bitcoin wallet was locked behind one forgotten password, then AI found a way in

Imagine waking up to realize you changed the password of your crypto wallet worth nearly $400,000 while you were high, only to spend the next decade or so trying trillions of combinations to recover it. For one X user (@cprkrn), this wasn't a nightmare; it was the reality. He had bought five Bitcoins back when one cost just $250 (all five cost $386,180 today), then promptly locked himself out of the account. However, after years of failed efforts, he'd given up on this fortune until his one final attempt with the help of Artificial Intelligence paid off, as he narrated his story on May 13, 2026, in a post that has since amassed more than 700 thousand views. 

A lost crypto fortune

We've already heard many a tale about people losing millions of dollars in crypto after forgetting their passwords. This is exactly how things were about to end up for this person, until he decided to use Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude to dig through their college laptop's data. However, given that he'd already failed multiple times before, he didn't expect anything much from this as well. However, he couldn't have been more wrong, as Claude identified an old wallet.dat file that appeared to have predated the password change. 

An impossible password

The password, as he later revealed in his post, was, "lol420fu*kthePOLICE!*:)". As you'd expect, the person was left speechless, as AI helped him reclaim his nearly $400,000 payout, which he would've unfortunately had to let go otherwise. Meanwhile, as soon as he posted this on X, the story spread like wildfire within the crypto world, highlighting the real value of AI assistance in today's world, helping people organize and interpret years of data, rather than trying to bypass Bitcoin Projects' security itself. 

Millions have lost access to their crypto account

Nonetheless, this isn't an isolated incident. In fact, if anything, this person is quite lucky to have found his access back, with a staggering 35% of crypto users across America claiming that they've lost access to their wallet or account, according to Jersey 101.5. What's more concerning is that out of this, about 31% of the accounts or wallets have been lost for good, and those losses are not small either. Each of those lost accounts lost a whopping $5,000 or more in a single incident. This further highlights how this incident could help other users as well. 

Readers express their views

At the same time, it also goes to show why people in the comments section of the tweet were so happy for the person, as they lauded AI, including the person himself, who swore to name his kid after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, which isn't surprising given he's just bagged nearly half a million dollars. @ukiscorrupt wrote, "Insane man AI is getting ridiculously good and bad at such an insane rate. I’ll just say insane one more time." Meanwhile, @LiveLongAndCSS commented, "No wonder you forgot it, your brain is fried, can't even spell mnemonic."

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