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Playbook

Claude: Export While You Can, Anthropic Has No Legacy Tool

Platform claims verified July 22, 2026

Claude (Anthropic)

The short version

Anthropic has no digital-legacy program. No legacy contact, no beneficiary feature, no published deceased-user process on any tier. The Consumer Terms make the account non-transferable without written consent, contain no succession provision, and permit deletion of account data on termination; accounts inactive over a year without a paid plan may be terminated. As with all AI chat services, conversation content sits in the most protected legal category (stored communications), so an estate without an export faces legal process with uncertain results.

The only reliable path is to export while alive and encrypt the export to your archive key (legacy recipient), which converts provider-controlled content into bearer data your circle can recover.

What this account holds

Conversation history, Projects (workspaces with custom instructions and accumulated knowledge), memory, artifacts, and any API credits. Projects in particular tend to accumulate months of structured working context that exists nowhere else.

What to do now

  1. Sign in at claude.ai on the web or Claude Desktop (export is not available from the iOS/Android apps).
  2. Initials (bottom left) → Settings → Privacy → Export data. Select the time range if prompted and confirm.
  3. Anthropic emails a download link, usually within minutes, longer for large accounts. The link expires after 24 hours. You must be signed in to download.
  4. The ZIP contains conversations.json plus account data.
  5. Projects are not included in the export. For each Project that matters, manually copy the custom instructions and any critical project knowledge into a document. If a Project represents real work product, treat this as mandatory, not optional.
  6. Memory is also not in the conversation export: Settings → check the Memory section, expand the summary, copy it into the same document.
  7. Encrypt everything to your archive key, store the ciphertext anywhere durable, and record the location in your executor packet.
  8. Refresh on your liveness cadence (6 to 12 months). If a full export fails silently, a known issue on large accounts, retry with a shorter date range (e.g. last 3 months) and keep prior exports as the archive.

When someone has died (executor steps)

  • Do not attempt to log in with recovered credentials. It is unnecessary if exports exist, and unauthorized access to stored communications carries legal risk.
  • Locate the newest encrypted export via the executor packet; recover the archive key through the share ceremony; decrypt offline (the recovery tool, or any age binary).
  • To stop billing: cancel the subscription at the payment-card level, or contact Anthropic support (help center ticket; no published phone support for consumer accounts) with a death certificate and proof of appointment. Expect manual review with no published checklist.
  • Team/Enterprise accounts: succession runs through the organization’s Primary Owner, not the estate. Contact the employer’s admin.

Required documents (survivor side)

Certified death certificate, letters testamentary or equivalent, requester ID, and the account email. There is no documented path by which these yield content, only, plausibly, closure. Plan accordingly (see setup above).

Expected timeline

Export while alive: minutes to hours. Post-death closure via support: weeks, discretionary. Post-death content without an export: assume never.

Gotchas

  • Projects are the trap. The export people assume is complete omits exactly the highest-value data. The manual Project copy above is the most important step in this playbook.
  • Retention settings interact with training preferences (30-day vs multi-year retention depending on your choice); do not assume history persists server-side indefinitely. Your export is the archive.
  • The 1-year inactivity termination means a dormant free account can vanish before your estate is even opened. Export before going dormant.
  • Unencrypted exports are plaintext transcripts of private thinking; encrypt to your archive key before any cloud storage touches them.
  • Exports are snapshots; conversations after the last export are unrecoverable.
  • A large export locks fine but may not reopen in the browser, where roughly a gigabyte is the practical ceiling. These are ordinary age files, so age -d -i key.txt export.zip.age > export.zip works at any size. Unlock yours once now rather than leaving your family to discover which route they need.