Anthropic Says Its 'Share' Feature Was Working as Intended. Your Private Claude Chats Were Still on Google.

A Reddit user discovered it with a single Google search: typing site:claude.ai/share into Google's bar surfaced private conversations from Anthropic's Claude chatbot that other users had marked as "anyone with the link," a toggle in the share menu that, in practice, was not a privacy setting. Bing was indexing them too. The exposed conversations reportedly included medical records, internal corporate data, personal information, and explicit content.

The discovery landed on r/ClaudeAI late last week via the user -void1, who posted that a Google search returned "a lot" of shared Claude conversations. VentureBeat independently verified the indexing for Claude Artifacts, the shareable tools, visualizations, and mini-apps built inside Claude, though the outlet said it could not load the shared conversation URLs themselves. Wired's headline confirmed the same exposure on Google and Bing, and PCMag walked readers through how to test their own shared chats. By Sunday, VentureBeat reported that many of the original search results had been pulled or made much harder to surface, though the indexed surface remains unstable.

Anthropic's defense is that the share feature is working as designed. A spokesperson told CNET that shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless users post them somewhere, and that once content is shared, third parties may archive it. PCMag added that Anthropic suggested the share function never sent link information directly to search engines, and that users who pasted their share links into forums or social media may have given crawlers a path in. The mechanism description and the index reality are not fully aligned, and any user who never posted a link anywhere reachable would still expect "anyone with the link" to mean what it says.

The gap between "working as designed" and "private chats on Google" is the same gap OpenAI ran into two years ago. PCMag reported that OpenAI faced a near-identical controversy in 2023, when shared ChatGPT conversations were indexed by Google, and OpenAI's response was to remove the option to make shared chats appear in search at all. Forbes reported the same shared-chats indexing issue for Anthropic in 2024, with those results later scrubbed, according to CNET, meaning this is the second time the company has had to mop up a publicly indexed "anyone with the link" surface and ship a fix without shipping a product change.

For users, the cleanup takes about a minute. CNET points to Settings > Privacy > Shared Chats in Claude, where any conversation that has been made shareable can be reviewed and unshared. Anthropic has not announced a change to the share feature itself, and as of this week the indexed surface was still shifting.