Some Claude AI chats publicly available online

Hundreds of transcripts of chats with Anthropic’s AI service Claude have been found publicly available and accessible to anyone online

The conversations could be found if someone used an internet search engine adding specific search terms. The search could return Claude chats which a user had chosen to share with a link. Claude informs users that “anyone with the link” may view the conversation, but does not say that the link may be saved by search engines such as Google, Bing, Brave, and Duck Duck Go.

Users on the platform Reddit found the public chat transcripts, which included over 200 conversations including personal and work information. The availability of the chats was removed over the weekend, although some had been saved and shared online. The accessible conversations included the names, addresses, and contact details for individuals, as well as private conversations and proprietary research for their work.

Both OpenAI and xAI have had similar problems with shareable links to chat conversations becoming publicly available. In response to issues last year OpenAI have changed the way that ChatGPT transcripts are made available.

A spokeswoman for Anthropic said that the links to users’ conversations were “not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves”. However, she added: “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”.