BitGo co-founder and CEO Mike Belshe has thrown down a public challenge to Anthropic on X, saying the company can try to take 100 BTC that he deposited into a BitGo wallet if Claude is really as capable at hacking as some claims suggest.
The source said the 100 BTC was worth about $6.3 million at the time. In a post dated Aug. 1, 2026, Belshe wrote: “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. 100 BTC:”
Belshe targets Anthropic’s security narrative
The post was aimed squarely at Anthropic and the recent discussion around Claude’s offensive security capabilities. Belshe’s message was blunt: if Anthropic has really built something that can break into systems, it should try doing it on a real wallet holding real money rather than leaning on a dramatic narrative.
The source also linked the exchange to earlier Anthropic-related developments. It referenced Anthropic’s accusation that Alibaba had “illegally stolen” Claude, involving 28.8 million conversations and nearly 25,000 fake accounts. It also cited background material saying Anthropic’s valuation had surged 550% to $1.2 trillion, above OpenAI.
The BTC is held in an institutional custody setup
That does not mean the funds are easily reachable. Belshe placed the BTC into BitGo’s institutional-grade custody platform using a multisig or MPC structure, according to the report.
The source said moving the funds would require breaking through multiple layers of key management, approval policy, hardware protection and operational controls. It contrasted that with the three incidents Anthropic had disclosed, which it described as attacks against misconfigured test machines exposed directly to the internet. In other words, the report framed the two scenarios as being on very different levels of difficulty.
Online reaction casts the episode as marketing
One reply under Belshe’s post, from user @tonygentilcore, joked that the marketing logic of the whole spectacle comes in three tiers: third-rate is saying “look how dangerous we are,” second-rate is trading barbs over who is more dangerous, and first-rate is saying “come try it.” The comment suggested Belshe’s move may also function as a marketing play.
On-chain data shows no outflows so far
As of now, Anthropic has not issued a public response to the challenge. Public blockchain data cited by the source shows the wallet address still has a spent_txo_count of 0 and a spent_txo_sum of 0, which means no funds have been moved out. There are also no pending transactions in the mempool.
The source added that Anthropic is unlikely to act, saying that if it really were capable of doing so, the implications would be serious.