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An urgent warning has been issued to Claude AI users after hundreds of private chats were found publicly available online.

These conversations were not hidden away in a dark corner of the internet but, rather, easily accessible with a simple Google search.

The issue was flagged by a Reddit user, who discovered that a well–structured query was enough to dredge up users' most intimate conversations.

Exposed chats included users asking for advice about which political party to join, discussing bizarre conspiracy theories, and drafting their LinkedIn posts.

While those topics might seem innocent, several betrayed personal details that made it easy to identify the users.

In one particularly alarming case, one user shared the details of a cryptocurrency 'wallet', allowing anyone online to access the funds contained within.

Other posts contained graphic erotic role play – something that Claude's usage policies expressly prohibit.

If you're worried that your private thoughts might be visible for all to read, here's how you can check if you've been affected.

Cybersecurity experts have issued an urgent warning to Claude AI users after hundreds of private chats were found publicly available online

The issue appears to be linked to Claude's 'share' function, which allows users to show parts of their chat to others.

Pressing the share button creates a public URL that users can send to someone else, allowing them to see the chat.

Normally, pages like these would be 'indexed' by the web crawlers used by search engines like Google.

Indexed pages are stored away in the search engine's database and can be found by anyone who uses the right search terms or looks hard enough.

Anthropic is supposed to include special tags and information in these URLs that tell the web crawlers used by search engines like Google not to 'index' these pages.

This is usually done by attaching something called a 'robots.txt' file and a special 'noindex' tag that tells the web crawler not to add this page to the database.

However, as reported by Wired, the leaked chats didn't include this vital information that would ensure they remained private.

That means hundreds of chats that had only been intended to be shared privately ended up accessible to anyone on the internet.

A Reddid user discovered that private claude chats could be accessed with nothing more complicated than a Google search

In September last year, hundreds of shared Claude chats were made accessible on Google and other search engines after being indexed.

Anthropic said that it had fixed the issue and the pages became hidden again after a short period.

If you did share a chat in the last few months, however, there is a chance that it was made publicly accessible online.

Anthropic appears to have, once again, fixed the indexing issue, and the results no longer show on Google, Bing, and Brave search engines using the method posted to Reddit.

However, anyone who found the URL previously can still access the chat, and many conversations were saved or shared following the discovery on Reddit this weekend.

That means you can no longer specifically search for your own chats to see if they had been indexed.

The chances of any specific chat being read are relatively low, but it is worth checking to make sure you haven't shared any chats that contain sensitive information like passwords or banking details.

Although chats don't show up in Google results, the ones shared on Reddit still lack a 'noindex' tag, which means they could show up in search engine results again.

The issue affected chats that had been turned into URLs after being shared. Some were relatively harmless, like this conversation about birds, but others included revealing personal details

To keep your conversations secure, Claude users can go to Settings, Privacy, Shared Chats to manage access or 'unshare' the conversations to keep the contents private.

An Anthropic spokesperson told the Daily Mail: '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.

'These shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves.

'When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third–party services.'