Conversations that users had shared through Claude's "share" feature briefly surfaced in Google search results over the past weekend, exposing sensitive information in some cases, including cryptocurrency wallet keys, according to a Fortune report.
The exposure came to light after users flagged the issue on Reddit, prompting scrutiny of how shared chat links were being handled online.
Anthropic Says Shared Links Are Not Meant To Be Discoverable
Responding to the report, an Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune that "in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google", in line with its stated privacy principles. The spokesperson added that these "shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves. 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".
Fortune reported that Anthropic has since fixed the issue, and that links to Claude conversations are no longer surfacing on Google, though it noted that links already exposed before the fix remained live and accessible to anyone who already had them.
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Only Shared Conversations Were Affected
According to Fortune's reporting, Claude conversations remain private by default, and only chats users had actively shared with someone else were affected. When a user shares a conversation, Claude generates a snapshot of it at its own web address, meant to be sent to one person or a small group, without granting access to the user's full account or other conversations.
This is not the first time chatbot conversations have surfaced in search results. Forbes had previously reported a similar issue last year, when nearly 100,000 ChatGPT conversations were exposed on Google through the same kind of flaw, and Elon Musk's Grok chatbot has reportedly faced a comparable problem in the past.
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