Claude Chats Leak Out onto the Internet - DTNS 5318

**Tom Merritt** (0:08)
This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, July 27th, 2026 We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand.

**Robb Dunewood** (0:17)
Today, Claude Chats leak out on Google again, impossible preset setting cases on data at the US border.

**Tom Merritt** (0:23)
I'm Tom Merritt.

**Robb Dunewood** (0:24)
And I'm Robb Dunewood.

**Tom Merritt** (0:26)
And most people are just listening to this, they have no idea that anything is amiss. But if you're watching the video at youtube.com/dailytechnewsshow or anywhere else, you may wonder if I forgot to turn my lights on. I'm actually following the advice of a doctor.
Dr. Nicky suggested this app called TimeShifter that tries to prepare you for jet lag. And I'm flying to Japan tomorrow. So it said that until noon today, I need to avoid light as much as possible and wear sunglasses when I can't avoid light. So my lights are off and I'm wearing sunglasses, Robb.

**Robb Dunewood** (0:59)
Tom, I'm glad you explained that because I thought either you just had cataract surgery or have a concussion. So I'm glad that neither of those two things have just happened.

**Tom Merritt** (1:08)
Those are reasonable assumptions if you don't know otherwise. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story.
The 404 reports on a Reddit thread that showed that people have found some chats with Claude have been indexed by Google. Again, this has happened before, not even just Anthropic. The discovery was made by doing a site-specific search on Google. So you put site colon and then the domain name claude.ai/share.
These are going to give you links to pages with info people have shared with someone else. So if you haven't run into this before, if you're using Anthropic, and you can do this in OpenAI and Gemini too, you can share a chat and it creates a link that you send to the person you want to share it with. And that link is a publicly accessible page. Anyone with the link can see it, but the chances of anyone guessing the link are small, unless a search engine indexes it.
By the way, you cannot do this kind of share in team or enterprise accounts. This only affects people with individual pro, max or free accounts. The pages would not be indexed in Google search if there was a no index tag. However, Anthropics robots.txt file instructs search engines to skip reading the share pages, saying, well, with no reason not to put a no index, we'll just say, don't read this page at all. And Google respects that. Google does not read the page, which means it never sees the no index tag, which means it doesn't put the context of, the contents of the pages on the internet, but those links can be publicly linked elsewhere. So Google will quite often pick up the link. So when you do a site-specific search, you just get a list of links. There's no information about what is in them, but anybody can click on them and see.
That's probably not a problem for a large number of chats, but it's a big one for some of them, including people who shared sensitive information, things like cryptocurrency access keys. It would be easy to automate a script to go through looking for those kinds of links and then drain somebody's wallet. However, nobody has confirmed a seed phrase or a working key available in any of these. Nobody has reported any stolen funds because of this, so that's still hypothetical. But there were examples of API keys being in there, names and addresses, kinds of things that you get in normal breaches, but probably these people didn't want those available in a search engine. 404 Media says the links no longer appear, so Google may have mitigated the listings, at least for now. But a search for shared interactive workspaces does still work. And like I said, this happened to OpenAI last year. It happened to Grok last year. It's also happened to Claude in the past. Robb feels like they should figure this out so that the no index happens and these don't get indexed and then the links don't show up.

**Robb Dunewood** (4:10)
So, Tom, if I'm honest, I'm not even mad that this happens. This just lets me know and should let everyone know that if you put stuff on the Internet and you don't have it end to end encrypted, you should just assume that it's going to show up at a search engine at some point. That's probably a safer way to think that a chat that you're, you know, with the chat bot that you share with somebody to think that it's safe, because this has happened over and over again from multiple different vendors on multiple different search engines, and it will continue to happen. And like, you know, folks are upset with Google. It's like, why?