Claude AI Can Now Search And Reference Past Conversations

Claude is one of the main AI competitors to ChatGPT and Gemini, but Anthropic's chatbot doesn't necessarily offer feature parity with its rivals. For example, Anthropic released web search, deep research support, and voice mode in previous months, features that had been available in ChatGPT well before they made it to Claude. Fast-forward to mid-August, and Claude received a big memory upgrade that allows the chatbot to reference past chats. The feature is similar to a ChatGPT capability that allows the AI to reference past chats. Claude's "Search and reference chats" feature started rolling out on Monday across web, desktop, and mobile.

Anthropic detailed the new feature in an updated support document that explains how Claude personalization works. The AI's ability to search past chats and reference those conversations isn't identical to ChatGPT's broad memory feature that can remember things about the user. Claude's chat memory isn't persistent, as it only works on a chat-by-chat basis.

Anthropic on Monday started rolling out the new "Search and reference chats" feature to Claude Max, Team, and Enterprise users. The AI firm said it will expand it to other plans "soon."

The example in the YouTube video above shows how Claude's chat memory feature will work. A user asks the AI what they were working on before their vacation, and Claude performs a search to identify the conversations that qualify. Claude discovers five results, listing them in the chat and providing a summary to the user so they can decide what topic to resume.

To enable Claude's "Search and reference chats" feature, you'll have to go to the "Settings" menu in the app, click on "Profile," and find the "Preferences" section. In there, you'll have to enable the "Search and reference chats" feature by clicking the toggle. You can toggle off the feature if you want to prevent Claude from searching and referencing past chats.

Anthropic explains in the support document that Claude can perform searches in your chat history to find relevant conversations with the AI that can add context to the current chat and "keep your conversation flowing." However, Claude will not remember things about you like ChatGPT's broader memory feature does.

Anthropic spokesperson Ryan Donegan informed BGR that Claude's new search functionality isn't persistent memory. Claude will not build a user profile. It will only perform searches when you instruct it to.

Claude can search for any chat outside of projects or search within projects. In the second scenario, searches are limited to that project. Anthropic also explains that users can't exclude distinct chats from the search feature. The only way to ensure that specific conversations with the AI do not resurface in Claude searches is to delete them. You can disable "Search and reference chats" to prevent Claude from referencing chats you don't want the AI to find. But this method will not let you look for any old chats you might need.

Comparatively, ChatGPT won't let you enable its "Reference chat history" feature that matches Claude's new memory ability without also turning on the "Reference saved memories" feature. The latter is OpenAI's broader memory feature for its chatbot. Also, OpenAI made available the memory features to ChatGPT Free users a few months ago.