Countless Claude chats and artifacts (interactive mini-apps and documents that users can create within Claude) were discovered to be publicly searchable on Google over the weekend after Reddit users discovered that typing search operators like “site:claude.ai/share” into Google brought up a long list of shared conversations. It reportedly included health records, private company documents, and children’s names and phone numbers.
This issue appears to be caused by Claude’s “shared chat” feature. This feature allows users to create links that allow anyone with an assigned URL to view a conversation or project. “Anyone with the link can view it,” a warning appears on Claude’s interface. This wording suggests that the feature is primarily intended to allow users to share chats with friends, colleagues, and small groups rather than with the entire Internet. For example, Google Docs offers similar functionality, but these documents end up not being publicly available on Google.
Anthropic appears to be blaming users for their exposure. What happened? The company told TechCrunch that shared links will only appear in search results if they’re posted somewhere search engines can see them, such as forums or social media posts. It added that links sent privately to someone will not be included in the search.
Spokesperson Amy Rotherham added in a statement: “We give our users control over the public sharing of their conversations with Claude, and in accordance with our privacy principles, we do not share our chat directories or sitemaps with search engines such as Google. These shareable links cannot be inferred or discovered unless you choose to share them yourself. When someone shares a conversation, that content becomes publicly accessible and, like other public web content, may be archived by third-party services.”
The issue was first reported by a Reddit user on Saturday and first reported by 404 Media on Monday morning.
As of Monday afternoon, a test search on Google by TechCrunch following the method outlined in the Reddit post returned no results, suggesting that the exposure had somehow been remediated.
Before this issue was resolved, Futurism reported that it had discovered “detailed medical reports of actual patients, clinical test results containing patient names, documents sharing elementary school children’s names and phone numbers, company documents marked for internal use only, and employee reviews containing employees’ personal information.”
The published artifacts included code and working notes. In at least one case, a chat labeled “Shared by Anthropic” showed Claude producing erotica, Fortune magazine reported.
Anthropic’s usage policy explicitly forbids Claude from producing sexually explicit content, and patterns that force chatbots to produce content that violates its stated guidelines (through repeated or creatively constructed prompts) regularly surface in most major AI models. It is not yet clear from the published chat how the content in question was generated, and Anthropic has not yet responded to TechCrunch’s request for comment on this specific matter.
Google spokesperson Ned Adrians told TechCrunch: “Neither Google nor any other search engine controls which pages are published on the web, and these pages were indexed by many search engines. We give site owners clear control to decide whether their pages can be crawled or indexed, and we always respect that direction.”
Last year, Forbes reported on a similar issue where hundreds of Claude’s chats were indexed by search engines. At the time, Google estimated that just under 600 conversations were indexed before the page disappeared from search results. How exactly the current exposure tracks its size has not been independently confirmed, but multiple users reported finding conversations shared through the same type of Google search queries that were used to surface last year’s cache. Also last year, 404 Media reported that researchers were able to collect approximately 100,000 ChatGPT conversations that were set to be shared publicly.
To see which Claude chats you have set public links to, go to (Settings) -> (Privacy) -> (Shared chats).
If you buy through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect editorial independence.
