Hundreds of conversations with Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot were found to be accessible online through search engines, according to BBC News.
The BBC reported that chats made available through Claude’s sharing feature appeared in site-specific searches on services such as Google. Some of the conversations included personal details, work-related material and other sensitive information.
The search visibility was removed over the weekend, although the BBC said many of the links had already been saved and circulated online.
An Anthropic spokeswoman told the BBC that users decide whether to share conversations with Claude. She said links to chats are “not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves”. She added that when a conversation is shared, the content becomes publicly accessible and may be archived by third-party services.
Claude’s sharing option tells users that anyone with the link can view the conversation, but the BBC said it does not explicitly state that such links may appear in Google or other search results.
The publicly available chats were first identified by Reddit users, the BBC reported. They covered more than 200 conversations across at least 25 pages of search results, including some from recent weeks.
Examples cited by the BBC included a user asking Claude last year whether it wanted to help the user or Anthropic more, a conversation from April involving a draft unpublished blog post about cloud security and corporate project details, and users seeking help with CVs that contained names, contact information and work histories.
The BBC also reported that some chats appeared to involve work research, including in healthcare, and transcripts of private conversations.
Similar issues have previously affected other AI chatbots. The BBC said OpenAI changed how easily ChatGPT logs could be accessed after a comparable incident last year, while Grok on X also had large numbers of chat logs made publicly available through online search.
A Google spokesman told the BBC that Google does not decide which web pages are public, and said website owners are given controls over whether pages can be crawled or indexed. The BBC reported that, because the Claude chat logs were no longer being indexed, Anthropic was likely to have used available tools to block the links from search results.
Other search engines, including Bing, Brave and DuckDuckGo, were approached for comment, according to the BBC.