Can other people use my Claude Artifact?
Yes. Once you publish it, anyone with the link can open and use it, with no Claude account needed. What they cannot be is recognised. An artifact has no login of its own, so it cannot tell one visitor from another. If it uses shared storage, everyone writes into one pool where all users see and interact with the same data, and no record carries an author. That is fine for a public tally or a shared word list, and wrong for anything involving names, roles, or rows that only some people should see.
Last checked against Anthropic's documentation on . Claude changes often. If something here no longer matches the help centre, the help centre is right.
What other people can do with your published artifact
- Open it and use it, with no sign-up, from any browser.
- Use every interactive part of it. Anthropic's phrasing is that they can try all basic functionality without a Claude account.
- Write into shared storage, if the artifact has any, including changing and deleting what other people put there.
- Copy it into their own conversation and modify it, if they have a Claude account. That copy is independent of yours in both directions.
- Read the code. Publishing an artifact publishes its source.
What the artifact cannot do about them
This is the actual limitation, and it is architectural rather than a missing feature. Anthropic states it plainly:
An artifact is a static page. It can't store data submitted through a form or authenticate viewers itself.
Share session output as artifacts, Claude Code documentation
- It cannot identify anyone. No login, no session, no user record. Every visitor is anonymous and indistinguishable.
- It cannot attribute a record. Nothing stamps who wrote a row. If you want a name on it, the person has to type their own name, which is a claim rather than a fact.
- It cannot restrict anything. There are no roles, so there is no such thing as read-only for some people or admin for others.
- It cannot show one person only their own rows out of a shared dataset. Shared means shared, all of it.
- It cannot call anything. The page is sealed by a strict content policy: no fetch, no external requests, so it cannot ask some other service who the visitor is.
The CSP blocks scripts, stylesheets, fonts, and images loaded from any other host, along with fetch, XHR, and WebSocket calls.
Share session output as artifacts, Claude Code documentation
What that breaks, with a concrete example
Take the most ordinary multi-person request there is: a team leave-request form. Ten people, each submits days off, a manager approves them.
| What you need | What a published artifact does |
|---|---|
| Each person submits their own request | Works, but the row has no owner. It is a row anyone wrote |
| Each person sees only their own requests | Not possible. Shared storage shows everyone everything |
| Only the manager can approve | Not possible. Any visitor can flip any status field |
| Nobody can delete somebody else's request | Not possible. Everyone has the same power over every record |
| You can tell who approved what | Not possible. There is no identity to record |
| Only the team can open it | Not possible on a public link. The link is the only access control |
Every one of those rows fails for the same single reason: the page has no way to know who is looking at it. You cannot fix that from inside the artifact, and an agent asked to fix it will produce something that looks like a fix, usually a name field or a password typed into a text box, which is a convention that anyone can ignore rather than a rule that holds.
Where multiple people on one artifact works genuinely well
Anonymity is not always a defect. When the state is per visitor or genuinely communal, an artifact beats every account-based alternative, because the alternative makes people sign in for no benefit.
- Per-visitor tools. A mortgage calculator, a unit converter, a quiz, a practice drill. Personal storage keeps each visitor's own state and nobody needs an account.
- Communal counters. A vote tally, a shared idea board, a guestbook, a collaborative list where nobody minds who added what.
- Explainers and demos. Anything whose whole job is to be understood by a stranger in thirty seconds.
- Anything you are sending to people you cannot ask to sign up. Customers, a mailing list, a conference audience, a forum thread.
For all of those, the fact that there is no account wall is the product. Adding accounts would make it worse.
When people need to be people
The dividing line is simple. If the answer to "does it matter which of them did it?" is yes, an artifact cannot carry it, and no amount of prompting will change that.
Homespun is where the same agent that built the thing can host it. People sign in with their email, so the app can tell who is who and every row remembers who created it; permissions are set per collection, so some people can approve and others can only submit; and the agent keeps read and write access to the collections it is allowed, so it can keep working on the data instead of handing you a page and walking away. It is free today, and there is no paid plan to buy.
| Requirement | Published artifact | Homespun app |
|---|---|---|
| Anyone can open it with no account | Yes | Only if you deploy it as an open app on purpose |
| The app knows who each person is | No | Yes, once they sign in |
| Rows belong to the person who created them | No | Yes, creator is recorded on the row |
| Some people can do more than others | No | Yes, set per collection |
| Private rows in a shared dataset | No | Yes |
| Only invited people can get in | No, the link is the access control | Yes, a private app is invite only |
| Files and photos | No, text only | Yes, images, PDFs, audio and video |
To be fair about the cost: the top row is a real loss. Asking ten colleagues to sign in once is nothing; asking two hundred strangers to sign in to use a calculator is a mistake. Pick by which of those you have.
Questions people ask next
Can other people edit my Claude Artifact?
They cannot change your artifact. A signed-in viewer can copy it into their own conversation and edit that copy, which is entirely separate: nothing they do affects your original, and nothing you do afterwards reaches their copy.
Can several people use one Claude Artifact at the same time?
Yes. There is no limit on concurrent viewers, and with shared storage they can all read and write the same data. What they cannot do is be distinguished from one another, because the artifact has no way to authenticate anyone.
Can I make an artifact private to certain people?
Not on a public link: whoever holds the link has full access, so the link is the only access control there is. On Team and Enterprise accounts, artifacts can be restricted to members of your organisation instead of being published publicly.
Does a Claude Artifact know who is using it?
No. Anthropic's documentation says an artifact cannot store data submitted through a form or authenticate viewers itself. There is no login, no session and no identity, so every visitor is anonymous and looks the same to the page.
Can I stop one person from deleting everyone's data?
Not in shared storage. Every viewer has the same power over every record, so anyone with the link can change or delete anything. If that matters, you need an app with real accounts and permissions rather than an artifact.
Do viewers need to pay for Claude to use my artifact?
No. Opening and using a published artifact is free and needs no account at all. A viewer with a Claude account can also copy it, and any AI features built into the artifact run within that viewer's own usage limits.
Primary sources
Every claim about Claude on this page comes from Anthropic's own documentation, quoted rather than summarised so you can check it yourself.