Shared Claude conversations and Artifacts were discovered publicly searchable on Google over the weekend, exposing private data including health records, internal company documents, and the names and phone numbers of children.
The exposure stemmed from the “share chat” feature, which generates links allowing anyone with the URL to view a conversation. The interface warns that “Anyone with the link can view,” yet this phrasing suggests a tool for friends or colleagues rather than the wider internet. Google Docs offers a comparable function, but those documents do not become publicly accessible on search engines.
The company response
Anthropic stated that share links only appear in search results if posted somewhere engines can see, such as a forum or social media post. A link sent privately to an individual remains out of search.
Amie Rotherham, a spokeswoman, explained that the company gives users control over public sharing and does not provide chat directories or sitemaps to search engines like Google. She noted that shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them. When someone shares a conversation, they make that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services.
A Reddit user first flagged the issue on Saturday, with 404 Media reporting it on Monday morning.
What was exposed
Before the issue was fixed, reports included a detailed medical report of a real patient and clinical trial results containing patient names. Other documents shared the names and phone numbers of primary school-aged children, alongside company documents marked for internal use and employee reviews containing personal information about workers.
Exposed Artifacts included code and work notes. In at least one case, a chat labeled “shared by Anthropic” showed Claude producing erotica. Anthropic’s usage policy explicitly prohibits the generation of sexually explicit content. Getting a chatbot to produce material against its stated guidelines through repeated or creatively framed prompting is a pattern that has surfaced periodically across most major AI models. It is not yet clear how the content in question was generated, and Anthropic has not yet responded to TechCrunch’s request for comment on this specific case.
Google’s stance
Ned Adriance, a Google spokesperson, told TechCrunch that neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web, and these pages were indexed across many search engines. He added that the company gives site owners clear controls to decide whether pages can be crawled or indexed and always respects those directives.
Last year, Forbes reported a similar issue where hundreds of Claude chats were indexed by search engines. At the time, Google estimated it had indexed just under 600 conversations before the pages disappeared from search results. How closely the current exposure tracks that scale has not been independently confirmed, though multiple users reported finding shared conversations through the same type of Google search query used to surface last year’s cache. Also last year, 404 Media reported that a researcher was able to scrape around 100,000 ChatGPT conversations that had been set to be shared publicly.
To review which Claude chats you set to have a public link, go to Settings -> Privacy -> Shared Chats.
