In a Shared ChatGPT Project, Everyone Can Read Everyone's Chats. In Claude, Nobody Does.
TL;DR. In a shared ChatGPT project, every member can read every conversation, and anyone can pick up a colleague’s thread and keep going. Claude keeps each chat with the person who ran it, and a shared chat (which you must manually do) is a snapshot you can read but not continue. For teamwork inside the product, ChatGPT wins. Claude’s answer to teamwork ships in Slack, and most law firms run Teams.
Set up a project in Claude and a project in ChatGPT and the screens look like siblings, right up to the button that decides who gets to read your chats. Name it. Write some instructions. Drag in files. Click share. Four minutes each, tops.
Then the two products do opposite things with that last click.
ChatGPT treats a conversation as team property. Claude treats it as yours. Everything below follows from those two sentences, including who reads the half-finished argument your associate abandoned at midnight.
The two share buttons
The timing explains the design, since Anthropic shipped Projects on June 25, 2024 and put a knowledge base at the center of it. OpenAI shipped Projects that December as a personal organizer, added sharing for business plans on September 25, 2025, and opened sharing to everyone a month later. One company started with a shared shelf. The other built a private drawer and later put a door in it.
On a Claude Team or Enterprise plan you pick visibility when you create the project. “Only people invited” keeps it yours. “Everyone at your organization” drops it into the Team tab, where any colleague can find it by browsing or searching and start their own chat inside it. Invited members get one of two roles. Can view lets someone read the knowledge and chat in the project, while can edit adds the power to rewrite the instructions and manage members. An owner can switch off organization-wide projects for the whole company, and when they do, the option disappears from the creation screen.
On ChatGPT Business, Enterprise or Edu, the owner shares by email, by workspace group, or by creating a workspace link. Two roles again, called chat and edit, and edit can invite people and change files though only the owner can remove anyone. The ceiling is 100 people and 40 files, and Enterprise admins can switch shared projects off or limit them by role.
So far, so similar. Now open the project.
What a new member sees
I run a two-question test before sharing anything. What does a new member see on day one, and what does the firm see after that member leaves.
Picture a twelve-lawyer litigation group, one shared project, 40 documents in it. The twelfth lawyer joins on Monday.
In ChatGPT she sees every chat the other eleven have run inside that project. Each thread carries its author’s name, and the files are hers to download too. ChatGPT may also pull context from her colleagues’ conversations when it answers her question, because a shared project runs on one pooled memory that belongs to the project.
In Claude she gets 40 documents and the project instructions. No conversations at all, and that holds even in a project shared with the entire firm. Anthropic’s help center is blunt about it. Claude won’t carry context from one chat in a project into another unless somebody puts it in the knowledge base, and each person’s project memory stays their own, invisible even to an owner.
Read-only or resumable
Everything above is about who can see the work, and teamwork turns on who can pick it up. I had that half wrong until I checked.
Claude does let you hand a colleague a conversation. You click Share, Claude makes a snapshot, and on Team and Enterprise that link only opens for people inside your organization. Your colleague can read the whole exchange. What she can’t do is keep going. The snapshot freezes at the moment you shared it. It drops your attached files and any raw connector data, and Anthropic documents no way for the recipient to add a turn. She gets a photograph of the work.
ChatGPT hands her the work. She opens your chat inside the shared project, continues it, and that continuation lands in the project as a branch next to your original. It carries her name, and the other eleven can see it. The loop closes without anyone copying anything into a new window. I like the branching. I’d like it less on a client matter.
Now the correction that cuts the other way, because none of this is really threading. OpenAI’s own FAQ says chats in shared projects can be branched, not worked on together, and two people cannot type into one thread. OpenAI did build a true shared thread, though never on the business plans. Group chats launched November 13, 2025 for consumer accounts and went global a week later. They started retiring it on July 9, 2026. OpenAI said the wind-down keeps the product simpler. Call what’s left an asynchronous relay, and a relay still beats a photograph.
Anthropic isn’t contesting that ground. Their answer shipped June 23, 2026 as Claude Tag, in beta for Team and Enterprise, and it lives in Slack. One @Claude per channel, everyone in the channel sees what it’s doing, and anyone can pick up where the last person stopped. Cat Wu, who runs product for Claude Code and Cowork, told Fortune that chat, Cowork and Claude Code are very single-player, and that Tag was built to be the opposite. Read that as the concession it is, because Anthropic doesn’t plan to win multiplayer inside claude.ai. They’re betting it happens where your team already talks.
Which is fine if your firm runs Slack. Most don’t. In the ABA’s 2024 legal technology survey, Microsoft Teams showed up at about 63% of attorneys using cloud tools, behind only Microsoft 365 itself, and Slack didn’t make the reported list at all. Anthropic’s own help center says Claude Tag works in Slack today. A Teams version doesn’t exist, and Anthropic hasn’t announced one. What a Microsoft firm gets instead is the Microsoft 365 connector, which lets Claude read your Teams conversations without joining them.
So the choice is narrower than it first looked. If the collaboration has to happen inside the AI, buy ChatGPT and it isn’t close. Claude’s answer exists only for firms already living in Slack, and the survey says yours probably runs Teams.
What the firm can see
Both products use “private” to mean private from your colleagues. Your firm is a different question.
On Claude Enterprise, the Compliance API pulls chat content and file content across Claude deployments, and audit events come through the same API. A Claude Team plan has no Compliance API, but the Primary Owner can run an organization data export that includes conversations and uploaded files, and individual members can’t export their own. On ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu, the Compliance Platform does the same job, and only a workspace owner can grant the conversation messages permission. On ChatGPT Business, data export isn’t available at all, and the switch that turns off shared links belongs to Enterprise.
Most firms I work with buy the middle tier. On ChatGPT that’s the tier where colleagues see the most of each other and the firm can retrieve the least.
Then an associate gives notice. Remove a member from a Claude organization and the rest of the team loses access to her chats, old snapshot links return “Conversation not found,” and a project she’d shared with the whole firm stays put in the Team tab. Do the same in a ChatGPT workspace and her projects transfer to a workspace owner, while the conversations inside them follow the workspace retention policy and stay invisible to the new owner. Both answers land in the same place. What survives a departure is the files and the instructions. The threads are weather.
The part that actually worries me has nothing to do with visibility. It’s membership. A shared project is an information barrier now, and the person who clicked share is the one maintaining it. Neither product knows anything about your conflicts system. Nobody gets an alert when the project that holds one client’s documents picks up its fourteenth member from three practice groups. I’ve argued before that AI makes execution cheap long before it makes judgment or governance cheap, and the control layer above the work becomes the scarce thing. A share button is part of that layer.
What to do Monday
Open every shared project in both tools and read the member list out loud against the matter team. Remove the names that don’t belong. Twenty minutes. Do this one first.
Put the collaborative work where collaboration actually works. A ChatGPT shared project for internal and non-client matters, and Claude for the client files you want staying with one lawyer. If somebody pitched you Claude Tag, check what your firm runs before you plan around it.
Pick who runs the export or the compliance pull, and have them run it once this quarter. A control you’ve never exercised isn’t a control.
What makes ChatGPT collaborative is exactly what you’ll have to govern.
One final note as I wrap up this article - I think firms need to think very clearly about how they want to work in projects and the approach they want as a firm around collaborative spaces. To me, this is absolutely a key criteria in the buying decision now.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article. If you did, please share it with colleagues and feel free to repost.
Ending with a photo of Magnus yesterday who was just chilling in the corner.
