Users' seemingly private conversations with Anthropic's Claude showed up in Google search results

A trove of seemingly private conversations with Anthropic's Claude chatbot turned up in public Google search results last weekend, according to a report published Sunday. Some of the conversations reportedly included sensitive information like cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal details such as names and addresses. The problem affected chats where users had made use of Claude's share feature, which people typically use to send a record of a conversation to another person. The issue surfaced over the weekend when members of a discussion channel about Claude on the social media site Reddit found that typing a specific search phrase into Google would pull up a long list of shared Claude conversations. Claude's Artifacts, interactive tools and mini apps people build inside Claude, also appeared in results. The topics of the seemingly inadvertently exposed chats ranged from erotica to programming chats to work notes to fake book reviews. An Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune the company gives people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly and does not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google. The spokesperson said shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves and that when someone shares a conversation they are making that content publicly accessible. The company does appear to have fixed the issue, as the links are no longer available via Google through the technique shared on Reddit, though many previously exposed chat links remained live and reachable to those already with the link.