A Whole Bunch of People's Claude Chats Are Publicly Accessible Online, and There's Some Wildly Private Stuff in There

A trove of chat logs and projects created with Anthropic’s Claude — some including sensitive personal and company information — have been left exposed to Google, making them them searchable to anyone on the web.

The artifacts appear to have been made public when Claude users opted to distribute a given chat or project to colleagues or associates using the chatbot’s “share” feature. After hitting a “share” button in the top right corner, Claude notes that sharing will create a “public” link, and “anyone with the link can view.” The warning, though, doesn’t alert users that shared content could wind up being indexed by a search engine — meaning that a user could effectively be sharing their Claude-generated document with the entire internet.

Some of the artifacts exposed to the web and indexed by Google, such as personal websites and some vibe-coded apps, appear to have been created for public consumption. But much of the discoverable content was likely intended to be shared internally at a company, or between a small handful of people.

Such artifacts, which were reviewed by Futurism by way of Google Search, included what appeared to be a detailed medical report of a real patient, clinical trial results that included patient names, documents sharing the names and phone numbers of primary school-aged children, company documents marked for internal use only, and employee reviews that included personal information about workers. (We’re opting not to share any links to the content out of concern for users’ privacy.)

Reached for comment, Anthropic said the system was working as intended.

“We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google,” the company said in a statement. “These shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves. When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services.”

However, in its investigation last year, Forbes tracked down a user whose Claude material was appearing in Google search results who denied sharing the materials online.

The exposure was first spotted by Redditors over the weekend. As of this morning, the chats remain searchable.

This isn’t the first time this has happened at Anthropic: Forbes reported last year that hundreds of Claude chats had been indexed by search engines, prompting Anthropic to scrub the chats from the web. OpenAI and xAI have each been similarly caught in hot water after ChatGPT and Grok chat logs were revealed to have discoverable in Google.

If you’re hoping to send Claude-generated documents that may include sensitive information to colleagues, friends, or loved ones: you might want to stop hitting the “share” button, and instead opt to copy-paste the Claude-generated text into a secure document.

More on Anthropic: Anthropic Caught Secretly Spying on Users