Claude AI can now recall your past chats, but only if you ask it
Anthropic has announced that Claude AI can now remember your past conversations with it. The feature is not available for free users yet.
Anthropic has uploaded a video on YouTube to debut the feature. The 34-second video demos how Claude can recall a user's past chat with the AI, and use the information from it. This is pretty cool, now you don't have to repeat things to the AI every time, and it may also be helpful in case you forgot something and want to search for it.
For example, if you told the AI that you liked a book, game, movie, etc. It will remember it, and use that information to personalize your experience. Claude isn't the first AI to add such a feature. You may be aware that OpenAI's ChatGPT has a similar memory feature, so does Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.
These AI services have a persistent memory. The Verge reports Anthropic spokesperson Ryan Donegan who said Claude does not have a persistent memory feature. Users will need to ask Claude to retrieve information from past chats, it is not building a user profile. The ability to search past chats is rolling out to Claude’s Max, Team, and Enterprise subscription tiers, and it will be rolling out to other plans soon.
A support page on Anthropic's website has more details about Claude's personalization features. It says that the option to search pasts is enabled by default. But you can disable the feature, from Settings > Profile > Preferences section. Disable the option that is labeled “Search and reference chats”. If you don't see the toggle, that means the option to search past chats is not available for your Claude account yet.
That's interesting, Claude's support page explicitly mentions the feature is enabled by default, whereas The Verge reports that users will need to enable the feature manually. Perhaps the latter only applies to Team and Enterprise plans?
Do you prefer AI to remember your past chats?
I don’t see this option in Settings.
This is a smart and user-friendly approach to AI memory—Claude’s new ‘Search and reference chats’ feature lets you pick up where you left off without forcing continual memory retention. It’s great that nothing is auto-stored or referenced unless you explicitly trigger it, offering both context continuity and strong user control.
That said, it’s worth noting this is currently limited to Max, Team, and Enterprise users, with broader access arriving later
I’d love to see follow-ups on how well Claude retrieves relevant past chats and whether it’ll eventually allow selective exclusion of certain threads—so you don’t have to delete them just to remove them from search.