Over the weekend, private Claude AI chats were made publicly accessible by search engines like Google and Bing, making for a privacy nightmare for the people involved and the chatbot’s maker, Anthropic.
Privacy concerns surrounding AI have always been around, but as these tools become more capable of pushing into your daily workflow with agentic 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 significantly larger audience.
This latest example shows that even simply sharing a conversation with others can get it exposed to a significantly larger audience.
Initially spotted by Reddit users, the common factor in the problem seems to be that the indexed conversations were shared — a common option within most AI chats — allowing “anyone with the link” to view what had been said in the Claude conversation itself.
This feature is apparently not completely protected from web crawlers, and personal conversations, while initially shared by users with people they chose, were exposed for the entire internet to see if one knew where to look.
Conversations indexed included medical records, sensitive personal information, internal corporate data and explicit content. They could be viewed within Google and Bing with a simple search and adding “site:claude.ai/share” to the query, yielding a trove of conversations, most of which have since been removed. Artifacts — tools, visualizations and shareable apps — were also accessible through search engines.
This isn’t the first time this has happened: Last year, Forbes reported the same thing happened with Anthropic — hundreds of conversations appeared on Google search results, only for them to be scrubbed later.
An Anthropic spokesperson told CNET that its system is working as it should and that when people decide to share their conversations, they’re making them publicly accessible.
“Shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves,” the spokesperson said. “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.”
If ever there were a good time to adjust your privacy settings and delete old conversations from your go-to AI chatbot, it’s now. To view your shared chats in Claude, you can go to Settings > Privacy > Shared Chats.
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