Over the weekend, Claude AI’s private conversations were made publicly accessible by search engines like Google and Bing, creating a privacy nightmare for the people involved and the chatbot’s creator, Anthropic.
Privacy concerns surrounding AI have always existed, but with these tools able to permeate your daily life with agent capabilities, the threat of private data exposure is more timely than ever. This latest example shows that even simply sharing a conversation with others can get it exposed to a much larger audience.
This latest example shows that even simply sharing a conversation with others can get it exposed to a much larger audience.
Originally spotted by Reddit users, the common feature in the problem seems to be that indexed chats are shared – a common option among many AI chats – allowing “anyone with a link” to view what was said in Claude’s chat itself.
This feature is obviously not completely secure from web browsers, and personal conversations, while initially shared by users with people of their choice, were exposed all over the internet to see if a person knew where to look.
The identified conversations included medical records, sensitive personal information, internal company data and revealing content. They can be viewed within Google and Bing with a simple search and adding “site:claude.ai/share” to the query, bringing up many discussions, many of which have since been deleted. Artifacts — tools, observations and shared applications — were also accessible through search engines.
This is not the first time this has happened: Last year, Forbes reported the same thing about Anthropic — hundreds of conversations appeared in Google search results, which ended up being scrubbed later.
An Anthropic spokesperson told CNET that its system works fairly well and that if people decide to share their conversations, they make them publicly available.
“Shared links are not predictable or available unless people choose to share them themselves,” the spokesperson said. “When someone shares a conversation, they make that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services.”
If he is there it’s a good time to adjust your privacy settings and delete old conversations from your AI chatbot, now. To view your shared conversations on Claude, you can go to Settings > Privacy > Shared conversations.
