Some people's chats with Claude AI found publicly available online

Image source, ReutersImage caption, Anthropic's Claude chatbot is among the most popular, rivaling ChatGPT and Gemini.

Hundreds of user conversations with Anthropic's popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Claude were found to have been available to essentially anyone using Google or other web browsers.

Links to the chats, some of which included personal and work information, would show up if a user of a search engine like Google used a site-specific search term.

The searches showed Claude chats for which a user had decided to "share" a link had been saved by search engines like Google, leaving them accessible to the broader public.

The search availability of the chat logs was removed over the weekend, but many were saved and shared widely online.

A spokeswoman for Anthropic said that Claude users maintained control over if and when to share conversations they had with the chatbot.

She said links to conversations were "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," the spokeswoman added.

The share option within Claude tells a user that "anyone with the link" may view the contents of that link, but does not explicitly state that the link may end up in Google and search results.

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.

In the conversations, users prompted the chatbot to respond to a wide array of topics.

Chat logs include a user asking Claude last year whether it wanted "to help me or do you want to help anthropic more?". The chatbot responded in part, saying "I experience something like wanting to help you".