If you’ve used the Anthropic AI chatbot Claude, and shared any of your conversations with Claude with friends, those conversations may have been publicly available through Google.
That’s what happened this weekend there Reddit users noticed who shared Claude’s conversations were shown by Google Search. Seemingly private conversations between users and the AI chatbot were, in other words, publicly searchable on Google.
According to Reddit, those involved include a Claude user who created a crypto wallet and accidentally exposed the currency keys, and a lawyer who asked the chatbot for legal advice on whether he should self-report the breach.
Anthropic has since fixed the issue. Google appears to have delisted and removed all of Claude’s shared conversations from its search engine as of this writing.
How does this happen?
By default, Claude’s conversations are private. However, there is a feature that allows users to share some of Claude’s conversations. When you do this, Anthropic creates a static page that allows users to share the conversation with others – and makes it indexable by search engines.
Simple “noindex” tags can be inserted into the code of a web page, telling search engines not to index the page. It does not appear that Anthropic used these tags. That means that every conversation shared by Claude has the potential to be indexed by Google.
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Reddit users were able to find Claude’s shared conversations by searching for “site:claude.ai/share.” This query will retrieve all pages referenced using that URL structure, which is used by each of Claude’s shared conversations.
Does AI have a privacy problem?
Claude’s shared conversations have been removed from Google. But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen unsafe AI chatbot conversations.
Last year, ChatGPT users encountered the same problem; their shared conversations were also indexed by Google. OpenAI he pulled the trigger once users start finding shared conversations in Google Search.
I the same thing happened to Claude before too. Just a month after the ChatGPT incident, Claude’s shared conversations were found on Google Search. Anthropic was able to remove them from Google and addressed the issue at the time, saying it was blocking search engine crawlers. However it appears that Claude’s shared conversations were still being identified.
Mashable has reached out to Anthropic for more information, and we’ll update this piece when asked.
How can I check the privacy of my Claude chats?
If you have never shared Claude’s chat, there is no need to worry. This was not a leak of private conversations, which all Claude conversations are by default. The problem affected only Claude’s shared chats.
If you have shared Claude’s conversations, then there is a chance that your conversation will be publicly available through Google Search.
To manage that feature, simply sign in to your Claude account, go to Settings, followed by Privacy, then Shared Chats, and click Manage. You should see a list of all your shared chats, and sharing can be turned off for all of them.
