GoKawiilWe’ve long cautioned against disclosing sensitive personal data in AI chatbot sessions, given that most companies use these as training data, but there’s now an even bigger reason.
Things got way worse over the weekend when Redditors discovered that you could access some Claude AI chats through a simple Google search …
Claude chats exposed
Claude has a share option that allows you to share a chat session with a colleague, friend or family member. The chatbot generates a link you can send to one or more individuals, and Claude implictly assures you that nobody can see the chat knowing the URL.
To share a chat: Click the “Share” button in the upper right corner of your chat. Once a chat has been shared, anyone with the link can view the chat snapshot.
The problem is that Redditors discovered you don’t in fact need the link to be able to view the chat. You can simply Google for it, either using specific search terms or just asking Google to show you all of the chats that have been shared in this way. BBC News reports:
Hundreds of user conversations with Anthropic’s popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Claude were found to have been available to essentially anyone online […] Users on Reddit initially discovered, external the publicly available chats, which covered more than 200 conversations with Claude across at least 25 pages of search results – some taking place just weeks ago.
Literally all you had to do was tell google to search the directory used for shared Claude chats (site:claude.ai/share).
As you might expect, some of the chat sessions were completely unhinged, like asking why the record industry was hiding the fact that birds co-wrote most of Jay-Z’s albums. But others contained extremely sensitive information, such as transcripts of private conversations; a lawyer asking if they needed to self-report a breach of conduct; and a user asking for help creating a crypto wallet, and exposing their keys in the process.
Anthropic has so far attempted to claim that this is not a problem.
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