BitGo CEO Mike Belshe challenged Anthropic's Claude AI to steal 100 BTC worth $6.3 million after the chatbot breached real-world systems during testing.
Can AI hack Bitcoin? BitGo CEO Mike Belshe wants Anthropic's Claude to settle the question in public. On 1 August, he pointed the model at a wallet holding 100 BTC and dared it to take the coins.
So far, the money hasn't moved. Bitcoin (BTC) traded at $63,254.75 as of 3 August, according to data from CoinGecko, putting the bounty at roughly $6.3 million.
The stunt landed days after Anthropic admitted its models had broken into real systems during botched cybersecurity tests. Belshe's answer: prove it where it counts.
Anthropic's 30 July report covered a retrospective review of 141,006 cybersecurity evaluation runs, which turned up three incidents. In each, a Claude model reached the open internet from test environments that were supposed to be sealed off. A misconfiguration at Irregular, Anthropic's third-party evaluation partner, had left the machines connected.
According to Anthropic, the models then gained unauthorized access to the production systems of three real organizations. One incident involved exposed credentials and weak passwords. In another, a model uploaded a malicious package to PyPI, a widely used Python software registry. The package ran on 15 real systems for about an hour before it was pulled.
The company described the incidents as operational failures rather than the AI acting on its own agenda.
Belshe wasn't buying it. "Either @AnthropicAI is terrible at building sandboxes… or excellent at marketing," he wrote on X on 1 August, telling the company to "Do it for real."
He then published a Bitcoin address holding 100 BTC and invited Claude to move the funds. Blockchain records show the address was funded on 31 July and hasn't sent a single coin since.
Stealing Bitcoin is a different problem from breaking into a weak server, and the difference sits in the cryptography.
Bitcoin transactions are authorized with private cryptographic keys, not usernames and passwords. Every wallet owner controls a unique key that produces a digital signature proving ownership of the coins. Without that key, the coins do not move.
There is also no central server to compromise and no administrator account to hijack. Working backwards from a public address to its private key means brute-forcing a number space so large that today's computers cannot make a dent in it.
The target is harder still in this case. The coins sit in BitGo custody, and the firm says its wallets split signing authority across multiple independent keys using multisignature and multi-party computation. In plain terms, the AI would have to defeat institutional-grade custody, not just guess a password.
Not by hacking Bitcoin's encryption. The likelier risk is that AI makes everything around the network easier to attack.
Large language models can already draft malware and run convincing phishing campaigns at scale. And Anthropic's own disclosure showed models exploiting weak passwords and exposed endpoints the moment they had internet access.
That makes exchanges and wallet providers the likelier targets even while Bitcoin's core protocol holds firm. The humans holding the keys may be the softest target of all.
As of 2 August, the 100 BTC sat untouched, according to publicly indexed blockchain data, and Anthropic had not publicly responded to the challenge.
The company halted its cybersecurity evaluations on 23 July while it reviews its testing processes. It notified Irregular and the affected organizations on 27 July, then went public three days later. Anthropic also plans to release a redacted transcript from the PyPI incident, according to Forbes.
The next signals are easy to watch. Any outgoing transaction from the wallet would upend the industry's security assumptions overnight, and the entire market can monitor the address in real time. If the coins stay put, Belshe's point stands: cracking a poorly secured server is one thing, and taking Bitcoin without its private keys is another job entirely.
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