What happens between you and an AI chatbot does not always stay between you and the chatbot. Just ask Google, as people were surprised to discover that some Anthropic Claude chats could be easily found via web search.

The issue, which appears to have been first flagged by a redditor, exposed chats ranging from political advice-seeking to more... intimate matters. The problem stems from the basic functions of websites, search engines, and the collision of the two when generative AI gets in the mix.

Anthropic instructs web crawlers not to index chats shared with other people via something called a robots.txt file. However, preventing pages from being included in search engine results is harder than it might seem. Both Bing and Google say developers should also include a “noindex” tag on individual pages, but that wasn’t done here.

Despite efforts to keep these chats private, the indexing of shared Claude chats falls under Anthropic’s responsibility. Neither Google nor any other search engine controls what pages are made public on the web; these pages were indexed across many search engines. Microsoft and Anthropic declined to comment on this issue.