Memory & Search past chats

Memory & Search past chats is a two-component feature on claude.ai that gives Claude awareness of your conversational history across sessions. The first component, Chat Search, lets you explicitly prompt Claude to scan your past conversations and retrieve relevant information using transparent tool calls — Claude shows you what it's searching and cites the original chats it finds. The second component, Memory, automatically summarizes your conversations and synthesizes key insights across your chat history, updating roughly every 24 hours, so each new standalone conversation starts with relevant context already loaded. Together these features transform Claude from a stateless chatbot (where every new conversation starts blank) into a collaborator that accumulates understanding over time. Rather than injecting your entire chat history into every session — which would exhaust context limits — Claude uses a retrieval approach: it only pulls historical data when it's relevant or when you ask for it. Both components include privacy controls. You can pause memory (Claude keeps existing memory but stops forming new memories), reset memory entirely (permanent and irreversible), or use Incognito mode for temporary conversations that are never saved to history or memory. Enterprise plan owners can enable or disable the feature organization-wide, with individual users managing their own settings within those boundaries.