A trove of seemingly private conversations with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot turned up in public Google search results last weekend. Some of the conversations reportedly included sensitive information like cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal details such as names and addresses.
The problem affected chats where users had made use of Claude’s “share” feature—which people typically use to send a record of a conversation to another person.
The issue surfaced over the weekend, when members of a discussion channel about Claude on the social media site Reddit found that typing a specific search phrase into Google would pull up a long list of shared Claude conversations. Claude’s Artifacts—interactive tools and mini apps people build inside Claude—also appeared in results.
The topics of the seemingly inadvertently exposed chats ranged from erotica, programming chats, work notes, and fake book reviews. One chat—which was labeled as “shared by Anthropic”—showed Claude generating explicit content, which goes against Anthropic’s policy on erotica.
“We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune. “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.”
