Claude's public links pushed users' chats into Google search

404 Media reports that numerous conversations and materials created with Claude have turned up in Google search results. Anyone can scroll through other people's discussions or projects that their authors, by all appearances, did not consider public.

What ended up out in the open

Among the finds were a vibe-coded AI therapy app, meeting notes, and a dashboard apparently built to analyze data from medical bills. According to the available information, the exposed chats included private keys to crypto wallets, as well as personal information: names, addresses, and phone numbers.

The leak mechanism is simple. Claude, like other chatbots, lets you share a conversation by creating a public link. People do this in order to, say, forward the full text of a chat to colleagues or friends. But many don't realize that such pages end up in Google's index and become accessible to virtually anyone.

The Google dork and its fallout

The chats could be found using a so-called Google dork — a highly specialized search query for tracking down specific pages or files. This was described in a post on the subreddit devoted to Claude; it mentioned surfaced API keys, credentials, and personal details. As of publication, that query appears to have stopped working: 404 Media got no results in either Google or DuckDuckGo.

Claude, however, also offers “Artifacts” — interactive workspaces for running the apps and tools you've built. The query that surfaces them in search was still working as of this writing.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nothing new

The situation echoes last year's incident with OpenAI's ChatGPT, when nearly 100,000 conversations became accessible in search. At the time, a researcher managed to scrape that data, which means that even if Google or Anthropic remove the links from their results, copies may already have settled with third parties. On top of that, an exposed chat can be viewed via a direct link even after it has vanished from search results. Forbes noted that the same thing had happened with Claude last year, too.

Users would do well to check their privacy and access settings: these can be changed so that conversations are no longer publicly accessible.

Source: 404 Media