Hundreds of conversations with Anthropic’s artificial intelligence chatbot Claude were briefly accessible through search engines, exposing personal and work-related information after users shared chat links that were indexed by search engines.

The issue, first identified by Reddit users, involved more than 200 Claude conversations appearing across dozens of search results.

The chats covered a wide range of topics, including job applications, corporate projects, healthcare discussions and personal queries.

The publicly accessible conversations were no longer searchable by the weekend after the links were removed from search results, although many had already been archived and shared online.

Anthropic said users retain full control over whether to share their conversations and stressed that only chats users had chosen to make public through the platform’s sharing feature were affected.

A company spokesperson said shared conversation links were “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,” the spokesperson said.

However, while Claude’s sharing feature warns that “anyone with the link” can access a conversation, it does not explicitly state that the shared links may also be indexed by search engines such as Google.

The exposed conversations revealed users asking Claude to assist with a variety of tasks, ranging from drafting unpublished corporate blog posts and discussing confidential work projects to reviewing CVs containing names, contact details and employment histories.

Some chats also appeared to contain sensitive workplace material, including healthcare-related research and transcripts of private discussions.

The incident is the latest in a series of privacy incidents involving leading AI companies, raising fresh questions about how user conversations are handled once they are shared online.

Last year, OpenAI modified ChatGPT’s sharing system after publicly shared conversations became searchable online, while Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot also saw hundreds of thousands of shared chat logs indexed by search engines.

Google said it does not determine which webpages become publicly searchable, noting that website owners control whether their content can be crawled and indexed.

“We give site owners clear controls to decide whether pages can be crawled or indexed, and we always respect those directives,” a Google spokesperson said.

The removal of Claude conversations from search results suggests Anthropic used standard tools available to website owners to prevent further indexing.

Similar chat links had also appeared on other search engines, including Bing, Brave and DuckDuckGo.