Claude AI users' chats found to be publicly available online
The issue appears to have originated from Claude's "share chat" feature
Hundreds of Claude AI users' chats were briefly found to be publicly available for anyone to read online.
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Links to private chats could be pulled up by inputting a site-specific search term into a search engine like Google.
The issue appears to have come from Claude's "share chat" feature which allows users to create a link that allows anyone with the Url to view their conversation.
But the link is designed to only allow users who have been shared the link to view the chat, rather than the entire internet.
The trove of online chats was first uncovered by Reddit users on Saturday, who discovered that thousands of shared conversations were available on the internet.
Read more: OpenAI rival Anthropic launches AI assistant Claude in European Union
By Monday, Anthropic, which owns Claude, appeared to have fixed the glitch, with the ability to search for the chat logs removed.
But that wasn't before internet sleuths had combed through and saved the mine of chats, which were said to include "someone trying to become a nine-tailed fox" .
Another person asked the chat-bot "why the record industry is hiding the fact that birds are secretly professional rappers who co-wrote most of Jay Z's albums".
The robot responds by gently prodding the user to think through the "creative" theory "critically".
Others contained sensitive financial information, including one user's private crypto wallet key.
A spokeswoman for Anthropic said that links only appeared to chats when they had been posted somewhere else visible to a search engine, such as on social media.
Amie Rotherham said the company did not "share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google" and added that the "shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves".
It's not the first time that private Claude chats have made their way onto the internet.
The exact same problem affected the AI company last year, Forbes reported, and similarly led to almost 100,000 ChatGPT conversations being published on Google.
This is because, despite the share option within Claude saying that only those "with the link" can access the chat, often these are automatically published and left open to search engines without the original user's knowledge.
A spokesperson for Google said that they had no control over "what pages are made public on the web" and that "these pages were indexed across many search engines".
“We give site owners clear controls to decide whether pages can be crawled or indexed, and we always respect those directives.”