Hundreds of private conversations with Anthropic's popular AI chatbot Claude were publicly accessible through Google searches, exposing personal and work information. The chats, some from as recently as weeks ago, were discoverable because users had shared links to conversations that search engines then indexed.
The discovery was first made on Reddit, where users found more than 200 conversations spanning at least 25 pages of search results. The logs included a user asking Claude last year whether it wanted "to help me or do you want to help anthropic more?" The chatbot replied in part, "I experience something like wanting to help you." In another conversation from April, someone prompted Claude to draft an unpublished blog post about cloud security, revealing details of a corporate project. A user last month even asked how to "become become Nine-tailed fox?" — clarifying they wanted to literally transform from human to the creature. Claude initially responded with an AI-generated image claiming they had been given "fully functional fox powers!"
“Hundreds of private conversations with Anthropic's Claude AI chatbot publicly accessible via search engines after users shared links.”
Other conversations included users seeking help with their resumes, revealing names, contact information, and work history. Some conducted what appeared to be proprietary research for their work in healthcare, including transcripts of private conversations. The search availability of the chat logs was removed over the weekend, but many had already been saved and shared widely online.
A spokeswoman for Anthropic said Claude users maintain control over if and when to share conversations. She said links to conversations were "not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves." She added, "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 share option within Claude tells users that "anyone with the link" may view the contents, but does not explicitly state that the link may end up in search engine results.
The incident mirrors a similar issue with OpenAI's ChatGPT last year, after which the company changed the ease with which such logs were accessible. Anthropic, which positions Claude as a rival to ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, has not indicated whether it will make similar adjustments.