If you've used Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude, and shared any of your Claude conversations with friends, those chats may have been publicly available via Google.That's what emerged this weekend when Reddit users noticed that shared Claude conversations were being indexed by Google Search. Seemingly private conversations between users and the AI chatbot, in other words, were publicly searchable on Google. According to Reddit, those affected included a Claude user who was creating a crypto wallet and accidentally exposed keys to the currency, and a lawyer asking the chatbot for legal advice on whether they had to self-report a breach of conduct.
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Anthropic has since addressed the issue. Google appears to have de-indexed and removed all shared Claude conversations from its search engine as of this writing. How did this happen?By default, Claude conversations are private. However, there is a feature which lets users share specific Claude chats. When doing this, Anthropic creates a static page that allows users to share the chat with others — and also made it indexable by search engines.Simple "noindex" tags can be included in a web page's code, telling search engines not to index a page. It does not appear that Anthropic used those tags. That means each shared Claude conversation had the potential to be indexed by Google.
