Claude keeps a memory of you, and it is not a black box. Open Settings, then Memory, and everything it remembers is listed topic by topic: your job, your projects, how you like a reply. Claude writes these as you chat, and every new chat starts from them. That is why the list is worth reading. Leave a wrong entry in, an old job title or a project you finished months back, and every reply after it leans the wrong way until the entry is fixed.
Above the list, one switch is worth knowing. Sensitive topics such as health or beliefs stay out of memory unless you turn it on. So read every topic, edit the ones that have drifted, and delete the ones you would not want kept. You can also tell Claude in a chat what to remember and what to forget.
The facts come from Anthropic’s help page on chat search and memory and from the Claude blog post of 25 August 2026, both read on 14 October 2026, and from the Memory panel as seen on 13 October 2026. Memory is on by default for Free, Pro and Max, and an owner enables it on Team and Enterprise. Settings change, so check the pages for the current wording. This is an independent explainer, not affiliated with Anthropic.