Hundreds of discussions with the Claude chatbot — an Artificial Intelligence (AI) similar to ChatGPT developed by Anthropic — have appeared in Google search results for anyone to see. Reddit users were the first to spot the problem, pulling up more than 200 conversations across at least 25 pages of results — some from just weeks ago.

The exposed chats cover everything from personal matters and legal questions to workplace projects and software development. One Reddit user wrote: "Someone's trying to see if exercise can help them with cancer. This is awful to witness, and should be deeply private."

Some users even discovered sensitive information, like personal tax numbers.

"This needs to be reported and fixed asap. This should not be possible. I found many conversations including sensitive information like SSN," wrote a user.

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Claude has a handy sharing feature that lets you create a link to any conversation, so you can send it to a colleague or a friend — similar to when you share something on Google Drive. When you click Share, the platform tells you that anyone with the link can view it.

However, it never warned users that those links could end up in Google search results.

The shared pages appeared to be missing what's known as "noindex" instructions, a small piece of code that tells search engines like Google not to catalogue a webpage. Without that safeguard in place, any conversation link that had been posted publicly — for example, on a forum or social media — could be crawled and indexed, making it discoverable to anyone.

Some users had asked Claude for help polishing their CVs, handing over their full names, contact details and employment history in the process. Others had used the chatbot to draft unpublished blog posts about corporate projects, including one from April involving cloud security details.

Healthcare-related research also surfaced, with some conversations appearing to contain transcripts of private discussions. Health-related questions have been so popular with AI chatbots that ChatGPT released a specific feature for it. There were even reports of cryptocurrency wallet information turning up, though this hasn't been independently confirmed.

Anthropic pushed back on the idea that this was a data breach. A spokeswoman told the BBC: "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."

It appears that the chats have since disappeared on Google since being discovered on Reddit.

It's worth noting that Claude isn't the only AI chatbot to have tripped up in this way. ChatGPT faced a near-identical problem last year, with close to 100,000 conversations becoming searchable online — and OpenAI ultimately had to change how easily those logs could be found. Elon Musk's Grok chatbot ran into the same trouble, with hundreds of thousands of chats exposed through search engines.

If you've ever used Claude's share feature, it's well worth heading to Settings > Privacy > Shared Chats to review and disable any active links you no longer need.