You Can Now Import Your ChatGPT Data to Claude for Free
Anthropic is taking steps to ease the transition to Claude. While the AI chatbot app is popular among developers and vibecoders, it’s also infamous for keeping its most advanced features behind a paywall (and for rate-limited free users). But now Claude is finally catching up with ChatGPT and offering its memory feature to free users.
The move follows ChatGPT’s Claude overtaking the App Store to become the most downloaded free app in the US, so the timing makes sense. As for what might have sparked this sudden interest in the app, OpenAI recently announced that it would work with the U.S. Department of Defense (informally titled Department of War), a day after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei expressed concern about the unrestricted use of AI by governments.
Alongside the new free memory feature, Claude is also introducing a free import tool to help you take your AI context with you when you leave other chatbots. Technically, this is more of a guided prompt for feeding other bots, but the idea is that it can help new users avoid blank page syndrome. Within 24 hours of using the tool, Claude will theoretically know all the personal information you’ve previously shared with the chatbots you’re importing from, including special instructions, your career, and your current projects, making it easier to talk to Claude.
How to activate memory in Claude for free
Although Claude’s Memory feature is available for free to all users, it is not enabled by default. Let’s fix this. Open the Claude website or app, click on the Profile icon and navigate to Settings. Here in the Abilities section, you will see a new Memory section at the top. Activate the Generate memory from chat history functionality. Now Claude will automatically start remembering key details of your life as you share them. According to Anthropic, Claude will “automatically summarize your conversations and create a summary of key information from your chat history (not including chats in projects). This summary is updated every 24 hours and provides context for each new standalone conversation. »
Let’s say you are a dentist and you ask Claude for research on dental implants; he’ll know you’re learning more about implants the next time you ask a related question.
What do you think of it so far?
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
Of course, this means that Claude will also start remembering your personal data, or at least your personal context. Claude suggests several ways to get around this problem. If you try to disable memory (from the same menu where you enabled it), you will see two more options. For a less severe workaround, you can use the Pause memory option to prevent the chatbot from creating new memories while keeping its current memories intact. Or, you can choose the Reset memory option to permanently delete all memories, including project-specific memories. This way you can manually delete what Claude knows about you from time to time.
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
While you’re in Memory Settings, you can also use the new Import feature. Click on the Start import button to display the new menu. At the top you will see a prompt that you will need to copy. After that, paste it into ChatGPT or Gemini to retrieve your memories of these bots. You will get your results in a Markdown file. Back in Claude, paste the Markdown file into the text box below the prompt you copied and click Add to memory. Claude will synthesize it, and he will add his data to his memory file.
