Hundreds of conversations between real people and the AI chatbot Claude were discovered publicly available on Google, including queries about birds as rappers and climate change denial. Reddit users unearthed the chats on Saturday using a site-specific search term, revealing 755 messages across multiple search results pages, according to a GitHub repository.
The exposed chats included a user asking if birds are 'secretly professional rappers who co-wrote most of Jay Z's albums.' Another inquired about transforming into a nine-tailed fox from Japanese mythology. A third requested to be called crude names. One conversation involved Claude fact-checking a climate change denier, while another user asked the bot to invent a new word, settling on 'transtill.' In a nearly 20,000-word chat, a person asked Claude if it is 'situationally aware' and later told the algorithm they 'feel bad' for it.
How the chats became public
The chats were not leaked or hacked but were shared by users via Claude's 'share' feature, which generates a unique URL. 'Once a chat has been shared, anyone with the link can view the chat snapshot,' Claude states. The snapshot includes all messages prior to sharing. A banner at the top identifies it as a 'copy of a chat between Claude' and the user's first name. Users can disable sharing via Settings > Privacy > Shared chats.
Anthropic, the AI startup behind Claude, told Metro that shareable links are 'not guessable or discoverable.' 'We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google,' the company added. However, if users post these links on forums or social media, Google's web crawlers may index them.
Search engine controls and missing tags
Each chat log includes a robots.txt file instructing search engines to avoid indexing, but as Google's developer guide notes, this is not foolproof; it recommends using a 'noindex' tag. Metro found that some previously Google-able Claude chat logs lacked this tag. Google stated: 'Neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web, and 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.'
As of Tuesday evening, test searches on Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Brave returned no results using the trick. A similar issue with ChatGPT occurred last year when 4,500 shared chat logs were found via Google. OpenAI tightened data controls in response. Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot on X, also saw 300,000 chat logs viewable via Google search.
