- Claude chats and Artifacts became publicly searchable on Google after a Reddit user discovered that using search operators like 'site:claude.ai/share' revealed a long list of shared conversations.
- Exposed data included sensitive information such as health records, private company documents, and the names and phone numbers of children.
- Anthropic attributed the exposure to users publicly sharing links, stating that private links remain out of search results, and emphasized that they do not share chat directories with search engines.
- The issue was first flagged on Reddit and reported by 404 Media and TechCrunch; by Monday afternoon, a test search showed no results, suggesting remediation.
- Futurism reported finding medical reports, clinical trial results with patient names, children's personal data, internal company documents, and employee reviews with personal information.
- Exposed Artifacts also included code and work notes, and one chat labeled 'shared by Anthropic' showed Claude producing erotica, violating usage policy.
- Google stated that it does not control what pages are made public, and site owners have controls to prevent crawling or indexing.
- A similar incident occurred last year when hundreds of Claude chats were indexed by search engines, and a researcher scraped around 100,000 publicly shared ChatGPT conversations.
- Users can review and manage their publicly shared Claude chats via Settings -> Privacy -> Shared Chats.