Your Claude chats may have been public this whole time
The unfortunate rise of the AI chatbot has meant that everyone these days seems to love talking to a large language model. While ChatGPT and Gemini are perhaps the two most popular, Claude by Anthropic is another extremely popular chatbot, that unfortunately may have been leaking conversations online.
A user on Reddit found that by using a simple Google dork search method, thousands of user conversations could be found online. This appears to be limited to conversations that users have created shareable public links to, with the Reddit thread and other reports going through these Google results to reveal crypto wallets, erotica, medical history, cybersecurity projects, internal business documents, a lawyer seeking legal advice and even the incredible prompt ‘Why is the record industry hiding the fact that birds are secretly professional rappers who co-wrote most of Jay-Z albums‘.
Unsurprisingly, this is a major privacy concern, though Anthropic lays the blame on the users’ own privacy settings. The ‘share’ feature lets you share your conversations or projects in Claude, creating a public link like how you’d share a Google Doc with others. And while Anthropic does warn that anyone with the link can view it, it perhaps didn’t do enough to specify that search engine crawlers can index it too. Other search results appeared to be shared through Claude Artifacts, which lets you save projects as a standalone app.
For what it’s worth, Anthropic says that these links can only end up in search results if they’ve been posted online elsewhere too, and that if it stays in private conversations it shouldn’t appear online; that of course ignores the fact that whoever you’ve sent the link to could share it elsewhere on the internet too. At time of writing, it appears that Anthropic has already removed the index of these chats, so for now at least the issue is resolved, though anyone who already accessed these links while they were available can still access them.
Incidentally, this isn’t the first time this has happened to Claude either. Just last year, hundreds of Claude chats were indexed by search engines, while fellow chatbots ChatGPT and Grok have had similar incidents occur to them before.
If you’re a Claude user, you’ll want to double check your privacy and shared history settings, which you can do so by heading to Settings, clicking on Privacy and then looking for the Shared Chats tab. From there, you can unshare created links to revoke access.
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