To show someone a conversation with Claude, all you need to do is hit "Share". The system takes a snapshot of the chat and generates a link that anyone can open. Some users discovered that "anyone" included Google and Bing.
Over the weekend, targeted searches surfaced numerous conversations and creations made with Claude. Among the results examined by journalists were requests for political advice, ethical and legal dilemmas, erotic role-play, documents and applications built with the Artifacts feature. The ordinary private chats had not been breached: these were contents that users had turned into public links, most likely without imagining they would become searchable.
Anthropic had included in its robots.txt file an instruction not to crawl shared pages. What was missing, however, was the noindex tag on the individual pages — the one Google and Bing recommend to prevent an already-discovered URL from appearing in results. The link was not easy to guess, but it could be found by search engines whenever it was posted elsewhere on the web.
After the reports came in, the chats no longer appeared in searches carried out by WIRED on Google. Bing, however, continued to show around six hundred results. The pages checked by the outlet still lacked the tag needed to explicitly exclude them from indexing.
Anthropic noted that conversations are private by default and that, when a public link is created, anyone who has that URL can see every message exchanged before the share was made. Technically accurate — but it doesn't resolve the misunderstanding: for many people, "anyone with the link" still means "only the people I sent it to".
The feature had turned a private conversation into a web page. The problem is that it hadn't explained clearly enough that a web page, sooner or later, can learn to be found.
