What are artifacts and how do I use them?

Artifacts allow you to turn ideas into shareable apps, tools, or content—build tools, visualizations, and experiences by simply describing what you need. Claude can share substantial, standalone content with you in a dedicated window separate from the main conversation. This makes it easy to work with significant pieces of content that you may want to modify, build upon, or reference later.

Artifacts work in three places: Claude and Claude Desktop, where this article focuses, and Claude Code, where Claude publishes session output as a shareable page. To learn how to create, update, and share artifacts in Claude Code, see the artifacts documentation on Claude Code Docs.

What are artifacts?

Claude creates an artifact when the content it's sharing meets these criteria:

Common examples of artifact content include:

Enable or disable artifacts

To adjust your artifacts preferences:

Access your artifacts

You can access all your artifacts through the dedicated artifacts space in your Claude sidebar. This space allows you to:

Work with artifacts

When Claude creates an artifact, you'll see the content displayed in a dedicated window to the right of the main chat.

Edit and iterate

View and export

In the lower right corner of the artifact window, you can:

Multiple artifacts

Fixing errors

If an artifact generates an error, look for the “Try fixing with Claude” button near the error message. Click the button to automatically copy the error details into a new message, then send it to Claude to diagnose the issue and suggest a fix.

AI-powered artifacts

You can build artifacts that embed AI capabilities, turning them into AI-powered apps. Users of your artifacts can access Claude's intelligence through a text-based API—answering questions, generating creative content, providing personalized coaching, playing games, solving problems, and adapting responses based on input.

Create AI-powered artifacts

How usage works

When you share AI-powered artifacts, others can use them immediately—no API keys required, and no costs to you. Whether your artifact helps 10 people or 10,000, sharing is free. Usage counts against each user's own Claude subscription limits, not yours.

For Team and Enterprise plans, when you share AI-powered artifacts within your organization, team members can use them without incurring additional costs to the creator.

MCP integration

Artifacts can connect to external services through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling interactive applications that read from and write to tools like Asana, Google Calendar, and Slack. In addition to Anthropic's official MCP integrations, artifacts can connect to any custom MCP servers you've configured.

When an artifact needs to access an MCP tool, you'll be prompted to approve access on first interaction. Your preferences persist for subsequent uses of that artifact.

Persistent storage

Artifacts can store data across sessions, enabling stateful applications like journals, trackers, and collaborative tools. Storage can be configured as either personal or shared:

When you interact with an artifact that uses shared storage for the first time, you'll see a confirmation dialog explaining that your data will be visible to other users of that artifact.

Storage specifications:

Privacy consideration: Artifact creators determine which data uses personal versus shared storage when building the artifact. Before entering sensitive information, consider whether the artifact uses shared storage.

Artifacts in Claude Code

Claude Code can publish its session output as an artifact—a live, interactive page at a private URL. The page updates in place as your session continues, and you can share it with people in your organization. An artifact might be a pull-request walkthrough with annotated diffs, a dashboard built from session data, or an investigation timeline that fills in as Claude works.

Artifacts in Claude Code are viewable only by members of the organization that published them.

Learn more

To share your artifacts publicly, embed them on websites, or discover artifacts created by others, see Publish and share artifacts.