How to share a Claude chat with a colleague (and what gets left behind)

The short answer

To share a Claude chat with a colleague, open the chat, click Share, confirm, and send them the link. They see a snapshot of the conversation up to that moment. Attached files and tool call data stay behind, and on Team and Enterprise plans only people in your organisation can open it.

That is enough when you want someone to read what happened. It is not enough when you want them to take over the work. A link has no owner, no deadline and no files, and nobody can tell whether it was ever opened. The rest of this guide covers both cases: how to share well, and what to do when you actually need to hand something off.

How to share a Claude chat

Sharing takes three steps:

1. Open the chat you want to share and click Share.
2. In the dialog, click Share again to create the link.
3. Copy the link and send it to your colleague by email, chat or wherever you normally talk.

Before you click, scroll through the chat once. Everything up to this point will be visible to anyone who opens the link, including the early messages you have forgotten about: a first draft with the wrong figures, a client's name you mentioned in passing, a half-formed opinion about a supplier.

What your colleague sees

Your colleague sees a snapshot. It contains the conversation as it stood when you created the link. If you keep working in the same chat afterwards, those later messages stay private. The link does not update itself.

In practice this has two consequences:

• If the chat moves on, the link goes stale. Say you shared a chat on Monday and refined the proposal with Claude on Tuesday. Your colleague is still reading Monday's version, and nothing tells them so.
• The snapshot is something to read, not a place to carry on. Your colleague reads your thread. To continue, they need to take the context into their own assistant and start from there.

What gets left behind

The snapshot carries the text of the conversation. Several things do not travel with it:

• Attached files are not included. If you uploaded a contract, a spreadsheet or a brief, your colleague sees Claude talking about it but cannot open the file itself.
• Tool call data stays private. If Claude used a tool or connector during the chat, the data from those calls is not part of what you share.
• On Team and Enterprise plans, the link only works inside your organisation. That protects you from sending a client chat to the wrong person outside the company. It also means you cannot share that chat with a freelancer or a client this way.

There is also what a chat never contained in the first place. The deadline you agreed on the phone. The decision your manager made in a corridor. The fact that the client prefers email to calls. Use this checklist before you send any link:

Three workarounds

When a link is not enough, teams usually reach for one of three workarounds. Each one helps. None is perfect.

1. Ask Claude for a handoff summary

Ask Claude to write the summary your colleague needs, then paste it into an email or a message together with the files. Here is a prompt you can copy:

Write a handoff summary of this chat for a colleague who has not seen it.
Use these headings:
Goal: one sentence.
Current status: where things stand today.
Key facts: deadlines, amounts, names and decisions, as a list. Use the latest values only.
Open questions: what is still undecided.
Next step: what the colleague should do first, and by when.
Files: which files they will need.
Keep it under 200 words. Leave out anything I said privately about people.

Pros: fast, works on any plan, and your colleague gets the conclusions instead of the whole thread. Cons: the files still travel separately, the summary is frozen the moment you send it, and you have no idea whether your colleague has read it or started.

2. Use a shared project

On Claude Team and Enterprise plans, you choose a project's visibility when you create it. A project shared with everyone at your organisation shows up for your colleagues in the Team section.

Pros: good for knowledge that many people reuse, such as instructions, reference material and standard documents. Cons: a project is a shared space, not a task. It does not say who should do what next, and it needs the right plan. We compare this in more detail in Colle vs Claude projects and in ChatGPT shared projects vs Claude projects.

3. A doc in Google Drive

Paste the summary and the key messages into a document in a shared folder, next to the files. Send your colleague the link to the folder.

Pros: everything lives in one place, the files are included, and your company already knows how to manage access to Drive. Cons: it is manual work every time, the doc is disconnected from your colleague's assistant, so they paste it all back into a chat to continue, and there is still no owner or status.

When you need a handoff, not a link

A share link answers "what did we talk about?". A handoff answers four other questions:

• Who owns it now? One named person, or a team where one member picks it up.
• By when? A deadline written down as a fact, not buried in message twelve.
• With which files? The originals, not a description of them.
• Where does it stand? Sent, accepted, returned, done or overdue.

This is the gap Colle fills. Colle lets people hand off work between their AI assistants: you tell Claude or ChatGPT "send this to James", and James gets the summary, the facts and the files in his own assistant. With the Colle connector for Claude, it sounds like this:

Claude finds the right James, writes the summary and attaches the notes. James gets a browser notification showing who sent it, what it is and by when, and accepts it with one click. Then he asks his own assistant "what did I get?" and continues with the facts, files and history. He can pick it up in Claude or in ChatGPT. Files up to 25 MB travel with the handoff, and a handoff sent to a person is seen only by the sender and the recipients. The how it works page shows the three steps, and the pricing page shows what it costs: €15 per active person per month, and people who only receive notifications do not pay.

Colle does not replace Share. Share is still the quickest way to show a colleague a conversation. Use Colle when the work itself changes hands.

FAQ

Can my colleague see messages I send after sharing?

No. The link is a snapshot of the chat at the moment you created it. Later messages stay private. If the chat moves on and your colleague needs the new part, share it again or send a fresh summary.

Why can't my colleague open the files from the chat?

Attached files are not included in a shared chat. Send the files separately, put them in a shared folder next to a summary, or use a handoff that carries the files with it.

Can I share a Claude chat with someone outside my company?

On Team and Enterprise plans, sharing works only within your organisation. For someone outside, use the handoff summary prompt above and send the summary and the files through your usual channels.