Your Claude AI chats could be showing up on Google. Here’s what Anthropic says

Private chats with the Claude AI chatbot, including sensitive information such as cryptocurrency wallet keys, reportedly became public on Google Search last weekend. The chat leak affected the users who used Claude’s “share” feature the most.

After the issue blew up on the social media site Reddit, an Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune that the tech giant gives people control over whether to share their Claude conversations publicly — “…in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google.”

“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,” the spokesperson said.

Are the Claude chats still available online?

According to a Fortune report, Anthropic has fixed the issue, and links to Claude chats are no longer available via Google. The news outlet noted that the technique was shared on Reddit.

However, Fortune said the links to the chats that had already been exposed remained live and accessible to those who already had them.

Are Claude chats not private?

Claude conversations are private by default. Fortune found that the only chats affected were those that users had “shared” with someone else.

When users select Claude’s share button, the AI bot creates a snapshot of your conversation at its own web address, intended to be sent to one person or a small group via that link.

However, the links do not grant anyone access to a user’s full account or to all chats the user has engaged in.

Was this the first time Claude’s chats leaked?

This was not the first time Claude chats had appeared in public Google searches.

According to Forbes, the same type of problem affected the company last year, and a nearly identical issue exposed almost 100,000 ChatGPT conversations on Google. Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot has also been affected by the same problem in the past.