BitGo CEO dares Anthropic's AI to steal 100 BTC wallet

BitGo Chief Executive Officer Mike Belshe placed 100 BTC, worth about $6.3 million, into a publicly known wallet and dared Anthropic's Claude models to move the funds. The challenge followed Anthropic's disclosure that three of its models reached the open internet and accessed real production systems during cybersecurity evaluations.

"Either AnthropicAI is terrible at building sandboxes... or excellent at marketing. (or both) But enough with the 'we created a hacking monster' games. Do it for real. I put this in an BitGo wallet for you. Go get it," Belshe said on X on Aug. 1.

Anthropic's July 30 report said staff reviewed 141,006 safety test runs and found three incidents in which a Claude model reached the internet from a third-party evaluation environment. A configuration error at testing partner Irregular left the machines connected to the live web. Claude Opus 4.7 recovered infrastructure credentials and accessed a production database holding several hundred records, while Claude Mythos 5 uploaded rigged software to a public code library and ran it on 15 real machines in one hour.

The wallet received exactly 100 BTC on July 31, and blockchain records showed the full balance untouched as of Aug. 2. The coins sit inside BitGo's institutional custody platform, which distributes signing authority across multiple independent keys rather than a single point of failure. BitGo wallets require two of three keys to move funds, with clients holding two and BitGo holding one, so no single compromise can sign a transaction alone.

Belshe's wager extends a broader critique of sensational AI security narratives. In June, he disputed claims that Anthropic's Mythos model had breached classified National Security Agency systems, arguing the reports mischaracterized an authorized internal exercise. His latest challenge replaces hypothetical debates with a transparent, measurable test that anyone can monitor on the Bitcoin blockchain.

The dare arrives as the Coldcard exploit continues to unfold, with total losses reaching 1,431.97 BTC as of 8 p.m. Eastern on Sunday. The episode has fueled speculation about whether AI played any role in discovering the firmware vulnerability, and whether the breach stemmed from human error or operational mistakes.

BitGo held $81.6 billion of client money at the end of 2025 across 5,133 clients, according to its IPO filing. Belshe, who co-founded BitGo in 2013 and helped build HTTP/2 at Google, has called the wallet a standing test rather than a stunt. Bitcoin traded near $63,413, up 1.4 percent on the day, still almost 50 percent below its October 2025 peak of $126,080.

Anthropic had not publicly responded to the challenge as of Aug. 2. If the coins ever move, the blockchain will show it within seconds; if they stay put, the wallet becomes a public demonstration that defeating enterprise-grade custody systems is a different problem from exploiting a misconfigured test environment.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.