Hundreds of conversations with Anthropic's Claude chatbot were accessible to anyone using Google and other search engines over the past weeks. The links, which appeared in search results, contained personal details, work history, and proprietary business information shared by users. Anthropic has since removed the indexing, but copies of the chats have been widely circulated online.

The issue stemmed from Claude's 'share' feature, which generates a public link for any conversation. While the tool warns that 'anyone with the link' can view the content, it does not explicitly mention that these links may be crawled and indexed by search engines. A Reddit user first noticed the leak, finding over 200 conversations spanning topics from resume help to corporate cloud security drafts. Some users even asked Claude about transforming into a nine-tailed fox, revealing the chatbot's willingness to play along.

Anthropic defended the feature, noting that users control when they share conversations. A spokesperson said shared content becomes publicly accessible and may be archived by third parties – much like any public web page. The company quickly used available tools to block search engines from indexing the links. The incident mirrors similar events with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Elon Musk's Grok, both of which saw chat logs exposed through search indexing last year. Google reiterated that it does not control what pages are made public on the web, and that website owners hold the power to prevent crawling.

Source: BBC News