Claude Shared Chats and Artifacts Leaked, Indexed by Google Search
AI news alert: Claude’s shared chats and Artifacts feature had a privacy leak over the weekend. Reddit users discovered that searching site:claude.ai/share on Google surfaced numerous share links that should have been private, with some content including medical records, internal company documents, and children’s names and phone numbers. The issue appears to stem from Claude’s share chat feature, which generates links labeled ‘anyone with the link can view’ — intended for sharing with friends, colleagues, or small groups, not for public web indexing. By comparison, Google Docs’ similar sharing feature is not publicly indexed by search engines. When responding, Anthropic leaned toward blaming users, stating that share links only appear in search results when pasted to publicly visible places like forums or social media, and that privately sent links won’t be indexed; spokesperson Amie Rotherham also emphasized that the links themselves can’t be guessed or discovered, and the company doesn’t submit conversation directories or sitemaps to Google and other search engines. Before the fix, Futurism reported leaked content included detailed medical records of real patients, clinical trial results containing patient names, elementary school children’s names and phone numbers, internal-only company documents, and performance reviews with employee personal info. The leaked Artifacts also included code and work notes, and Fortune further noted that at least one conversation labeled ‘shared by Anthropic’ had Claude generating pornographic content, which directly violates Anthropic’s usage policy that explicitly prohibits generating explicit sexual content — it’s still unclear how that content was induced. As of Monday afternoon, TechCrunch’s testing of the same search method could no longer find relevant results, showing the issue has been partially fixed.