Some people's chats with Claude AI found publicly available online
Hundreds of private user conversations with Anthropic's Claude AI were found to be publicly accessible via search engine results. The issue stemmed from users sharing links to their chats, which were then indexed by search engines like Google.
Why it matters
This incident highlights significant privacy risks associated with AI chatbot sharing features and the lack of user awareness regarding how shared links are indexed by the public web.
Share Save Add as preferred on Google Kali Hays Technology reporter Reuters Anthropic's Claude chatbot is among the most popular, rivaling ChatGPT and Gemini. Hundreds of user conversations with Anthropic's popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Claude were found to have been available to essentially anyone online.
Links to the chats, some of which included personal and work information, would show up if a user of a search engine like Google used a site-specific search term.
The searches showed Claude chats for which a user had decided to "share" a link had been saved by search engines like Google, leaving them accessible to the broader public.
The search availability of the chat logs was removed over the weekend, but many were saved and shared widely online.
A spokeswoman for Anthropic said that Claude users maintained control over if and when to share conversations they had with the chatbot.
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