Some ‘private’ chats and docs are showing up on search engines. Here’s how to protect yoursUsers of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot were surprised over the weekend to learn that some of their conversations may be discoverable on search engines like Google and Bing. The revelation is raising questions about how much control people actually have over what they share online.Anthropic allows Claude users to create public links to their chat threads, which gives anyone with the link the ability to view th
Some ‘private’ chats and docs are showing up on search engines. Here’s how to protect yours
Users of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot were surprised over the weekend to learn that some of their conversations may be discoverable on search engines like Google and Bing. The revelation is raising questions about how much control people actually have over what they share online.
Anthropic allows Claude users to create public links to their chat threads, which gives anyone with the link the ability to view their conversations – similar to sharing options on apps like Google Docs. But what users may not have realized was that means their Claude conversations, however sensitive or personal, could show up in public search results.
An incident in which an autonomous OpenAI agent hacked a startup either confirms that the end is nigh – or that the product is just amazingly sophisticatedThroughout history, many things have been seen by terrified populaces as a harbinger of doom. A comet. A crow on the battlefield. A solar eclipse. A mutant livestock birth. Yet times move on. In the modern era, the leading harbinger of doom is literally any picture of the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, attached to a news story. You know it’s not goin
An incident in which an autonomous OpenAI agent hacked a startup either confirms that the end is nigh – or that the product is just amazingly sophisticated
Throughout history, many things have been seen by terrified populaces as a harbinger of doom. A comet. A crow on the battlefield. A solar eclipse. A mutant livestock birth. Yet times move on. In the modern era, the leading harbinger of doom is literally any picture of the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, attached to a news story. You know it’s not going to be good, right? You know that by the time you’ve read it, you’ll be begging to go back to the time when the worst thing that could happen to us at the hands of the techlords was just some democracy-subversion, or childhood destruction, usually followed by Mark Zuckerberg putting on a suit and claiming: “We will learn from this.”
Anyway: a lot of pictures of Sam Altman in the news of late. Most recently, this week, one darkened the skies alongside the tale of how an OpenAI autonomous agent went rogue during a supposedly sandboxed/guardrailed test, and hacked a major startup that functions as a repository of coding information. (I’m slightly obsessed with the fact that the startup in question is called Hugging Face, adding weight to my suspicion that some vast, tweely benign emoji is the last face humanity will see before it dies.)
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Marina Hyde’s new book, What a Time to be Alive!, is out in September (Guardian Faber Publishing, £20). To support the Guardian, order your signed copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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TL;DR: enter card details manually, not using Link, if you need to change your payment method and it’s stuck.
Three days ago my Claude Pro subscription was up for renewal but I’d forgotten to top-up the prepaid credit card I use for this. It was (logically) declined and my subscription was suspended.
I was using Link as the payment method.
No sweat, I thought, I’ll top up the credit card and “try again”. No luck, still declined.
Cool cucumber, I’ll just use another card this
TL;DR: enter card details manually, not using Link, if you need to change your payment method and it’s stuck.
Three days ago my Claude Pro subscription was up for renewal but I’d forgotten to top-up the prepaid credit card I use for this. It was (logically) declined and my subscription was suspended.
I was using Link as the payment method.
No sweat, I thought, I’ll top up the credit card and “try again”. No luck, still declined.
Cool cucumber, I’ll just use another card this month. Clicked through to select an other payment method, but… once I was back on the Anthropic payment screen, the active payment method displayed was still the first card that had been declined.
What I did:
What I got:
Then I went a bit wild. I tried to change the payment method again. I went into Link and removed the card, leaving only the second one, but the payment was still attempted by Anthropic (Link?) with the card I had removed
I logged out of Link and back in. I even tried Apple Pay. My card transaction statement shows a string of $0 card checks, and my inbox is full of e-mails telling me my payment was unsuccessful, but that is all that there is to show for these efforts. Whatever card I chose, Anthropic insisted on trying the same one again and again.
At some point, inspiration hit and I tried settling the open subscription invoice from inside Link directly, with my other card, instead of through the Anthropic billing screen. That worked!
But I wasn’t out of the woods. I wanted to buy some extra usage (I know, I know). The same frustrating dance started again, to no avail.
I decided to let it rest 24 hours and try again.
I tried again today. Same same.
In desperation (of course I’d already had a frustrating chat with Fin the Anthropic “support bot” and sent an e-mail to support) I tried chatting up the Link support chatbot. It confirmed that there was indeed a trace of the failed purchase on their side. At least something! I requested a human, and started chatting up my credit card’s support too, as I now had a clear indication that the purchase request had left Anthropic’s walls.
I’ll spare you the hour of slow, mind-numbing, half-chatbot-half-human support chats. You’ve been there I’m sure. There would be a lot to say.
In the end, after going around in many more circles, here is what worked:
I clicked to change the payment method on checkout on the Anthropic site
I disconnected Link in there
I entered my card details manually
What I did (notice how I’m not signing into Link here):
What I got (notice how this time I actually did manage to get it to switch to the Mastercard and drop the Visa!):
Lo and behold, the payment went through!
(This is the second card, mind you, I’m not that crazy. Next step, before my next subscription invoice comes around, will be to try and make a purchase with the initial – preferred – card. Maybe by then the e-mail the service cyborg promised with details of why the transaction failed will have reached me.)
Sharing this in hope it can spare at least one other person some headaches.
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