Hundreds Of Personal Claude Chats Surfaced On Google Search Exposing Sensitive Information
Hundreds of shared Claude conversations, including some containing sensitive information, became searchable on Google before Anthropic removed them.
Published : July 28, 2026 at 10:49 AM IST
Hyderabad: Anthropic found itself at the centre of a privacy issue over the weekend as hundreds of Claude chats were found publicly searchable. This came to light after a Reddit user discovered that using a simple search operator (site search command site:claude.ai/share) on Google could pull up users' shared conversations with Anthropic's AI chatbot.
Some conversations reportedly carried sensitive information such as health records, private company documents, crypto wallet keys, and phone numbers of children. Some chats also included erotica, seemingly generated by Claude despite safety guardrails.
The issue appears to stem from Claude's "share chat" feature, which allows users to create links for others to view the conversation or project. It mentions that creating a public link means "anyone with the link can view" the chat. However, it does not mention that the chat itself becomes publicly available and can be found by anyone using a search engine like Google.
Anthropic sort of blamed users for the mishap, as the company told media that links sent privately to someone stay out of search. It added that links only appear in search results when they've been posted somewhere search engines can see, like a forum or social media post.
The company spokesperson explained to TechCrunch that they do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google. "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," they told the publication.
Google spokesperson told the publication that neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web. Highlighting that the pages in question were indexed across many search engines, they said, "We give site owners clear controls to decide whether pages can be crawled or indexed, and we always respect those directives.”
As of writing, none of the shared Claude chats is available on any of the search engines. It appears that Anthropic has already fixed the issue.
This is not the first time user conversations with AI chatbots made their way to the public. A similar incident happened to Claude last year, when around 600 user conversations were indexed before disappearing from Google Search results. OpenAI also experienced an identical issue last year when ChatGPT chat logs became publicly accessible, with one researcher being able to scrape around 100,000 conversations. xAI's chatbot Grok also faced the same issue last year.
Even though shared Claude chats are no longer visible through Google Search, users can head over to Settings > Privacy > Shared Chats and manage their shared history to escape any mishaps. Similar settings are available across other AI chatbots as well.
