An untold number of Claude chats and artifacts (the interactive applets and documents that users can create within Claude) were found available for public search on Google over the weekend, after Reddit users discovered that typing search operators like “site:claude.ai/share” into Google brought up a long list of shared conversations. Some reportedly contained medical records, private company documents, and children’s names and phone numbers.

The issue appears to have originated in Claude’s “share chat” feature, which allows users to create links that allow anyone with the assigned URL to view a conversation or project. “Anyone with the link can see it,” Claude’s interface warns. The language clearly implies that the feature is primarily intended to allow users to share their chats with friends, colleagues, and small groups, not the entire Internet. Google Docs, for example, offers a similar feature and those documents are not publicly accessible on Google.

Anthropic appeared to blame users for the exposure. When asked what happened, the company told TechCrunch that sharing links only appear in search results when they were posted somewhere search engines can see, such as a forum or social media post; He added that a link sent privately to someone is excluded from the search.

Spokesperson Amie Rotherham added in an explanation that: “We give people control over how they publicly share their Claude conversations and, in line with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google. These shareable links cannot be guessed or discovered unless people choose to share them themselves. 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.”

The issue was first pointed out by a Reddit user on Saturday and was first reported by 404 Media on Monday morning.

As of Monday afternoon, a test search conducted by TechCrunch on Google following the method described in the Reddit post did not return any results, suggesting that the exposure has been fixed in some way.

Before the issue was fixed, Futurism reported finding “a detailed medical report from a real patient, clinical trial results that included patient names, documents sharing the names and phone numbers of elementary school-aged children, company documents marked for internal use only, and employee reviews that included personal information about workers.”

Artifacts on display included code and work notes. In at least one case, Fortune reported, a chat labeled “shared by Anthropic” also showed Claude producing erotica.

Anthropic’s usage policy explicitly prohibits Claude from generating sexually explicit content, and getting a chatbot to produce material according to its stated guidelines (through repeated or creatively framed prompts) is a pattern that has periodically emerged in most major AI models. It is still unclear from the exposed chat how the content in question was generated, and Anthropic has not yet responded to TechCrunch’s request for comment on this specific case.

Google spokesperson Ned Adriance told TechCrunch that “neither Google nor any other search engine controls which pages are made public on the web, and these pages have been indexed by many search engines. We give site owners clear controls for deciding whether pages can be crawled or indexed, and we always respect those directives.”

Last year, Forbes reported a similar issue in which search engines indexed hundreds of Claude’s chats; At the time, Google estimated it had indexed just under 600 conversations before the pages disappeared from search results. It has not been independently confirmed how closely the current exposure follows that scale, although several users reported finding conversations shared through the same type of Google search query used to display last year’s cache. Also last year, 404 Media reported that a researcher was able to extract around 100,000 ChatGPT conversations that were set to be shared publicly.

To review which Claude chats you’ve set to have a public link, go to Settings -> Privacy -> Shared Chats.