How to read your Claude export
Claude.ai lets you download your full conversation history. What arrives is a ZIP of JSON files — complete, but not something you can comfortably read. Here's how to request the export, what's inside it, and how to read your conversations and artifacts offline.
Step 1 — Request your data export
- Open claude.ai and click your initials, then Settings.
- Go to Privacy (data controls).
- Click Export data.
- Anthropic emails you a download link to a ZIP of your account data. Download it promptly — export links don't stay valid forever.
Step 2 — What's inside the ZIP
conversations.json— your complete chat history in machine-readable form: every conversation and message with timestamps. The valuable file — and the hard one to read raw.projects.json— your Projects: their instructions and attached documents.users.json— account metadata.
There's no browsable HTML in Claude's export — just the JSON. Opened in a text editor, a long history is effectively unreadable.
Step 3 — Reading what matters, beautifully
Claude writes in Markdown — answers, reports, and
especially artifacts. The work worth keeping can be saved
as .md files and read properly:
- Under any Claude response, click Copy — you get markdown, not flattened text. Markdown artifacts can be downloaded as files directly from the artifact panel.
- Save it as a file ending in
.mdand get it to your device — Files, AirDrop, or any sync folder. - Open it in Read.md: tables, syntax-highlighted code, even Mermaid diagrams render the way they were meant to look — offline, on iPhone, iPad, Android, or Mac.
What about the full archive?
An archive viewer that opens your whole conversations.json —
every conversation, searchable, readable — is in development
for Read.md. Today the app reads markdown files, not the export JSON itself.
If a Claude archive reader is something you want, tell us:
pabsoftware@gmail.com —
it directly shapes how soon this ships.
Using ChatGPT too? See the guide to reading your ChatGPT export.