Is Anthropic leaking your chats? Why some Claude conversations are appearing in Google Search

If you follow AI-related discussions, you likely saw posts over the weekend claiming that conversations shared via Anthropic’s Claude chatbot were appearing in Google search results. In fact, many users alleged an Anthropic data leak after screenshots surfaced online showing Claude conversations containing sensitive information—such as cryptocurrency wallet details, API keys, resumes, and business documents.

However, before assuming Anthropic has suffered a data leak, let’s look at what is actually happening. This is neither a security breach nor a hack; private Claude chats remain private. The issue affects only those conversations that users intentionally shared using Claude’s public "Share" feature, which generates a publicly accessible webpage.

There are worries that data may have been leaked after Reddit users found that a basic Google search, with terms like ‘site:claude.ai/share’ showed pages with Claude conversations. Some people called this a problem, for privacy. Others said the chats were shared on purpose by the people who owned them using the "Share" button.

Developer Om Patel was among those who raised the alarm about the issue on X, calling it a "serious privacy problem. " "When you use Claude's 'Share' feature, a public link is generated. It turns out those links were indexed by search engines; therefore, the option to 'share with anyone who has the link' effectively became 'anyone can find this by performing a search,'" he wrote in his post on X.

According to Patel, the issue was not that private Claude chats had been leaked, but rather that the public sharing links had become discoverable via search engines.

Why were Claude chats appearing in Google Search?

When Claude users click "Share," the chatbot creates a public webpage containing the conversation up to that point. Anyone with the link can open and read the chat. The problem was that some of these public links began appearing in search engine results, making them extremely easy to find.

Initially many developers thought that Anthropic had simply forgotten to add a noindex tag, which tells search engines not to include a webpage in their results. However independent analyses by developers and SEO experts showed that Anthropic had blocked the crawling of its shared chat pages using the robots.txt file. While this stops search engines from reading the page's content it does not always stop them from adding the URL to their index if they find the link elsewhere, on the web.

So, Google and Bing had some Claude links in their search results. Google and Bing did not show a preview of the conversation though. When people looked at Google and Bing search results for Claude, they saw a message that said "No information is available for this page”, for the Claude links. If someone clicked on the Claude link, they could still see the conversation that was shared on Claude. In short, the Claude conversations themselves did not appear in Google search previews, but the public links did, allowing anyone who found them to open and read the chats.

So, should Claude users be worried?

No, provided you haven't shared any chats. Only conversations that users had intentionally shared using Claude’s "Share" feature were accessible.

According to Anthropic’s support documentation, sharing a chat creates a public webpage containing the conversation. Uploaded files and data obtained through connected tools are not included. You can also review and delete shared chats by going to Settings > Privacy > Shared chats.

What kind of information was available on Google?

Reportedly, developers and researchers who viewed the indexed pages found everything from cryptocurrency wallet data and login credentials to resumes, business documents, legal inquiries, and everyday conversations.

As the issue gained online attention, many users reported that the shared chat pages were gradually disappearing from Google Search. However, some claimed the links continued to appear for a time on Bing and Brave Search.

It is worth noting that removing a page from Google Search does not deactivate the sharing link itself. Anyone who already has the URL can still access the conversation unless the owner manually cancels the sharing option.

At the time of writing, Anthropic had not issued a public statement regarding the incident.

OpenAI faced a similar issue

Anthropic is not the company that works with artificial intelligence to deal with this kind of issue.

Last year OpenAI introduced an experimental feature that let users make ChatGPT conversations shared with others visible to search engines. When users found hundreds of ChatGPT conversations, on Google Search OpenAI quickly took the feature down saying that it created many chances for people to accidentally share information they did not want to be public.