How to Make Sure Your Chats With Claude Don’t Get Published (Again)
If you use Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, you may know that your conversations may have been published on Google . This news broke over the weekend, when Reddit users discovered a treasure trove of conversations between Claude users and their chatbots. Simply entering a keyword and then adding “site:claude.ai/share” would find Claude discussions on the topic. Frankly, it was a mess.
Fortunately, Anthropic quickly patched the security vulnerability. Since then, a Google search for “site:claude.ai/share” returns no results, so you won’t be able to find any of these chats today if you try. However, it’s not much consolation that Google indexed these conversations at all—for the second time this year. Anthropic encountered a similar situation back in September , and while it’s not unique —Google once also indexed conversations in ChatGPT —you may naturally be concerned about the possibility of future chats being leaked online, as well as whether your current chats have been compromised.
Why did Claude’s correspondence become public?
The fact is that it appears not every chat on Claude was equally at risk of being disclosed. Anthropic adamantly states that it does not share chat links directly with Google; instead, according to Google , the vast majority (if not all) of these chats are conversations that individuals have chosen to share publicly online. Claude allows you to share your chats publicly, and while this can be convenient for showing friends, family, or colleagues a specific discussion, it can also expose your chat to Google’s web crawlers, as sharing a chat creates a public link.
So, there’s a silver lining: Claude’s private chats, which weren’t shared, are unlikely to be affected by this latest leak. If you don’t share your chats with anyone, you’re probably fine— though Futurism reported that one user involved in the Claude scandal in September swears they never shared their leaked chats. However, if you do share Claude’s chats, your conversations could have been included in the indexing that occurred over the weekend.
Complicating matters further is the fact that Claude’s “artifacts” appear to still be visible in Google . Claude generates artifacts when your project’s content meets certain criteria and can include anything: documents, code snippets, HTML sites, SVG images, diagrams, flowcharts, and interactive React components. In many cases, users want these artifacts to be publicly accessible, as they are intended for wide distribution. However, if you don’t want your artifacts indexed by Google, you’ll have to take action.
How to protect your correspondence with Claude from further disclosure
While there’s apparently no reliable way to determine whether your chats and files are on this list, you can ensure that none of them will ever be indexed by search engines in the future. To do this, you’ll essentially have to disable the file sharing feature.
To get started, go to Settings > Privacy in Claude, then select Manage next to Public Chats. Once a new page appears, you’ll see all your public chats, including the conversation link and post date. Scroll through the list and select Unshare next to each chat you want to delete. This won’t delete your chats, only the snapshots associated with these public links.