Google indexed private Claude chats with crypto keys

Private conversations with Anthropic's Claude chatbot, including cryptocurrency wallet keys, appeared in Google Search results last weekend. The leak affected users who had used Claude's share feature, which creates a public URL for any conversation.

Anthropic has fixed the issue, according to Fortune, and Claude chat links no longer surface via Google. But links that were already exposed remain live and accessible to anyone who saved them.

How the leak happened

Claude conversations are private by default. The problem hit only chats where users clicked the share button, which generates a snapshot of the conversation at its own web address. That URL is meant to be sent to one person or a small group. It does not grant access to a user's full account or other chats.

An Anthropic spokesperson told Fortune that the company does not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines. "These shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to share them themselves," the spokesperson said. "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 technique to find these chats was shared on Reddit, where the issue first blew up. Users discovered they could locate Claude conversations through specific Google searches.

What Anthropic says about control

The company's position is that users chose to make these conversations public. "In keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google," the spokesperson said. The implication: if Google indexed a shared link, it reached the search engine through another path, such as being posted publicly or crawled from a page where someone embedded it.

This framing puts the responsibility on users. But it sidesteps a design question: should shared links be indexable by search engines at all? A noindex meta tag or robots.txt directive could prevent crawling even if a link appears on a public page.

A recurring problem across AI chatbots

This is not the first time Claude chats appeared in public searches. According to Forbes, the same problem affected Anthropic last year. A nearly identical issue exposed almost 100,000 ChatGPT conversations on Google. Elon Musk's Grok chatbot has also been hit by the same vulnerability.

The pattern suggests a structural gap in how AI chatbot companies handle shared content. The share feature exists for convenience, but the privacy implications are not always clear to users. Someone sharing a conversation with a colleague may not realize they are creating a publicly accessible URL that could end up in search results.

The crypto angle

The exposure of cryptocurrency wallet keys is particularly damaging. Unlike a leaked password, a compromised private key cannot be reset. Anyone with the key can drain the associated wallet. Users who shared conversations containing such keys should assume those wallets are compromised and move funds immediately.

Source: mint / Arshdeep Kaur