A security researcher regained access to a Bitcoin wallet for Android after using Claude, an artificial intelligence model developed by Anthropic, to crack the eight-digit PIN that protected the Bitcoin wallet.
The incident was documented by cybersecurity expert Pavol Luptak, who detailed the process on his X account.
According to Luptak, A user asked for help regaining access to their wallet in the Bitcoin Wallet application. —Published on GitHub—had a large amount of BTC stored. The only data available was that the PIN was eight digits long and represented 100 million possible combinations.
The researchers indicated that they asked Claude to analyze the application’s source code to understand how the wallets are encrypted. This model identifies protection mechanisms and We have established a series of steps that must be completed on each attempt to verify if the PIN is correct. You were right.
With that information, Claude wrote a program to automatically test the combinations. Luptaak points out on his laptop: System reached 80 attempts per secondThis equates to 2-3 weeks of manual work to cover all possibilities.
Claude escalates attacks on cloud infrastructure
Due to hardware limitations, AI suggested splitting the work across multiple remote servers. After receiving access credentials to Hetzner Cloud (a cloud development service), Claude 5 autonomously provisioned machinesI ran a program that configured them, split combinations between nodes, and reported progress in real time.
Luptaak said the PIN was discovered after 14.5 hours of operation. The researchers claim that they never reviewed the code generated by the algorithm’s AI or had direct access to the servers, but “just waited for the results obtained on the first try.” Claude’s total active time did not exceed 30 minutes.
This incident is part of a trend that Anthropic itself is documenting. As reported by CriptoNoticias, in December 2025, the company published an experiment in which its AI agents exploit vulnerabilities in real smart contracts on networks such as Ethereum and BNB Chain. The simulated losses were close to $550 million.
In that study, the model generated functional attacks for 51.1% of the 405 contracts evaluated.
Luptarch concludes that Claude’s abilities are as follows: Combine code analysis, programming, and infrastructure management The time required for this type of operation is reduced from weeks to hours.
According to the researchers, the determining factor was not the failure of the application, but the limitations of the cause. This means that an 8-digit PIN is insufficient protection if the attacker has sufficient computing power.
