Share a Claude Design on a private URL, not a public artifact.

Standalone Claude Design closes on 14 December 2026

Anthropic's help center says it plainly: "The standalone version at claude.ai/design closes on December 14, 2026." Claude Design carries on as one of the templates you start an artifact from (the Artifacts tab, then Design), and design systems made in the standalone version can move over. Anthropic asks you to migrate them before it closes.

What the help center does not say is what happens to standalone projects after 14 December. If a design matters, keep a copy you control: open it, choose Export, then Export as standalone HTML. That file is the design as it renders, interactions included. PDF and PPTX are there too, for a flat copy. If a client is still reviewing a design you shared from the standalone app, publish the exported HTML and send that link, which keeps working whatever happens to the standalone project.

What Claude Design's share menu offers

Designs start private to you. Share lets you choose who can open a design and whether they can view, comment on, or edit it. Because a design is now an artifact, Anthropic's Share artifacts rules apply: everyone who opens it needs a Claude account (the only exception is a legacy artifact published from a chat), "Anyone with the link" is on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise (on Team and Enterprise only once an Owner allows it), and email invites (beta) reach up to 50 people outside your organization, each signing in on the invited address. The full table, plan by plan, is on AI sharing rules.

The Export button lists Download as .zip, Export as PDF, Export as PPTX and Export as standalone HTML, plus Google Slides. One entry matters more than the rest: standalone HTML. A design is an HTML document under the hood, so the export is the design, not a flattened picture of it. PDF and PowerPoint flatten the interactivity; the HTML is the real thing.

Then there is the send-to list: Canva and other tools you already use, and a handoff to Claude Code, either a local coding agent or Claude Code on the web. Notice what every destination has in common: it publishes or edits the design somewhere public or somewhere that needs its own account. None of them gives you a private, client-shaped link.

The gap: one client, zero accounts

The person a design most often needs to reach is not "the internet" and not "the workspace". It is one client, who has no Claude account, should not need one, and should not be handed a public URL that anyone who finds it can open. That is the exact gap Claude's artifacts had before it, and the same workaround closes it, because both are HTML in the end.

Export the design as standalone HTML, publish it to Stacktree, and send the link. Private by default: the URL is unguessable and appears in no listing. If the work is sensitive, add the gate: a shared password, or a magic-link check that the viewer owns an email at the client's domain. Set an expiry so the preview retires itself, or burn-after-read for a one-time reveal. When the design changes, update the same site and the link you already sent keeps working.

Three ways to publish the export

The dashboard route: drag the standalone HTML (or the zip) onto stacktr.ee and copy the link. The terminal route: one curl -F file=@design.html to the API. The agent route: connect the Stacktree MCP server and let Claude publish it for you, useful when the design has already round-tripped into Claude Code and lives in the repo. All three return the same thing: a live, private URL with the gates you chose.

Since 16 September: Docs and Slides have the same gap

Claude Design is no longer the only format with a share menu that stops at the workspace. On 16 September 2026 Anthropic put Claude Docs and Claude Slides into every conversation on the same Artifacts platform. Docs share with people inside your organization on Team and Enterprise and cannot be shared externally yet, a shared doc needs a Claude account to open on every plan, and Slides export as PowerPoint or PDF. The export-then-publish pattern on this page is the answer for those too; the routes per format are in sharing a Claude Doc or Slides deck outside your organization.

The same gap, now in Claude Code

In August 2026 a /design research preview landed in Claude Code, so designs now come out of the CLI and Desktop app as well as the web. The mechanics differ in a way that helps: there is no export menu, because the artboards are written into your working tree as ordinary files you can read and commit. What has not changed is where they end up. The canvas publishes as a claude.ai artifact, private to you until it becomes a link anyone can open, with no password, no email-domain gate and no expiry in between.

If anything the gap is wider here, because the command reads your codebase and designs against your real product, which is exactly the work you do for a client rather than for yourself. We ran it at launch and wrote up what it leaves on disk in What is /design in Claude Code?.