An untold number of Claude’s chats and Artifacts — the interactive mini-apps and documents that users can create inside Claude — were publicly searchable on Google over the weekend, after Reddit users discovered that typing search terms like “site:claude.ai/share” into Google brought up a long list of shared chats. Some allegedly contained health records, private company documents and children’s names and phone numbers.
The problem appears to have originated with Claude’s “chat sharing” feature, which allows users to create links that allow anyone with the assigned URL to view a chat or project. “Anyone with the link can see,” warns Claude’s interface. The language clearly implies that the feature is primarily intended to allow users to share their conversations with friends, colleagues and small groups — not the entire Internet. Google Docs, for example, offer a similar functionality, and these documents do not end up being publicly accessible on Google.
Anthropic appeared to blame users for the exposure. When asked what happened, the company told TechCrunch that sharing links only show up in search results when they’re posted somewhere search engines can see, like a forum or social media post. added that a link sent privately to someone remains out of search.
Spokeswoman Amie Rotherham added in an explanation that: “We give users control over sharing Claude chats publicly, and in accordance with our privacy principles, we don’t share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google. These shareable links are not guessable or traceable unless people choose to share them themselves. When someone shares a chat with other content, it can be publicly accessible. archived by third-party services.”
The issue highlighted first by Reddit user on Saturday and first reported by 404 Media on Monday morning.
As of Monday afternoon, a test search by TechCrunch on Google following the method described in the Reddit post returned no results, suggesting that the report has somehow been restored.
Before solving the problem, Futurism was mentioned finding “a detailed medical report of an actual patient, clinical trial results that included patient names, documents sharing the names and phone numbers of elementary school children, corporate documents marked for internal use only, and employee reviews that included personal information about employees.”
Exposed artifacts included code and working notes. In at least one case, Fortune reporteda chat marked “shared by Anthropic” also showed Claude producing erotica.
Anthropic’s usage policy expressly forbids Claude from creating sexual content, and asking a chatbot to produce material according to its stated instructions—through repeated or creative prompts—is a pattern that occurs periodically in most major AI models. It’s not yet clear from the exposed conversation how the content in question was created, and Anthropic has yet to respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment on the specific case.
Google spokesperson Ned Adriance told TechCrunch that “Neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are published on the web, and these pages are indexed by many search engines. We provide website owners clear controls to decide whether pages can be crawled or indexed, and we always respect those guidelines.”
Last year, Forbes reported a similar issue in which hundreds of Claude’s conversations were indexed by search engines — at the time, Google estimated it had indexed just under 600 conversations before the pages disappeared from search results. How closely the current exposure tracks on this scale has not been independently confirmed, although many users have reported finding shared conversations through the same type of Google search query used to surface last year’s cache. Also last year, 404 Media reported that a researcher was able to scratch 100,000 ChatGPT conversations which was set to be shared publicly.
To check which Claude chats you have set to have a public link, go to Settings -> Privacy -> Public Chats.
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