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The short answer
An artifact is substantial, self-contained content that Claude puts in a dedicated panel beside the chat instead of inline — code, a document, a chart, or a working mini-app you can interact with immediately.
They're available on every plan including free, and you can publish one to a shareable link in a couple of clicks.
What triggers an artifact
Claude creates one when the content is significant and stands on its own — typically more than about fifteen lines. Short snippets stay in the conversation; a whole component, document or page becomes an artifact.
You can also just ask. "Put that in an artifact" works.
The practical difference is that an artifact renders. Ask for an HTML page and you see the page, not the markup. Ask for a chart and you see the chart.
What you can build
- Interactive tools — calculators, converters, quizzes, small single-purpose apps
- Data visualisations from numbers you paste in
- Web pages and prototypes, complete and working
- Diagrams — flowcharts, architecture, process maps
- Documents you intend to keep and edit rather than read once
- Code files you'll copy into a project
The genuinely useful part is iteration. "Make the buttons bigger and add a reset" updates the artifact in place, so you refine a working thing rather than re-reading a new wall of code each time.
Publishing and sharing
Once an artifact works, hit Publish to generate a link. Anyone with the link can open and use it until you unpublish.
On Free, Pro and Max, publishing makes it publicly accessible to anyone with the link. On Team and Enterprise, sharing keeps it inside your organisation and viewers must be signed in to your account.
One nice detail: when someone with a Claude account opens your shared artifact, they can talk to Claude to modify it — and they get their own copy. Your original stays exactly as you made it.
What they're actually good for
Beyond demos, the recurring genuinely-useful cases:
- Explaining something interactive. A working calculator communicates a pricing model better than three paragraphs describing it.
- Prototyping before you build. Get a rough interface in front of someone in minutes and find out the idea is wrong before writing real code.
- One-off internal tools. The small utilities nobody will ever fund properly — a shift-rota calculator, a quick data cleaner — are exactly artifact-sized.
- Documents you'll keep editing. Anything you'll revise repeatedly is easier to manage in a panel than scrolling back up a conversation.
Limitations worth knowing
Artifacts run in a sandbox in your browser, which means no server-side code and no persistent database — state lives in memory for the session. They're for self-contained things, not full applications.
They also can't fetch from arbitrary external services. Plan for a self-contained tool and they work very well; expect a deployable production app and they won't.
Common questions
Are artifacts available on the free plan?
How do I share a Claude artifact?
Can someone edit my published artifact?
Can artifacts save data?
Artifacts work on the free tier
You don't need a subscription to try this — ask Claude to build you a small interactive tool and see what comes back.