Claude Desktop just add Incognito mode (aka “Private Chat”) feature

Is it meant to drive the desktop app adoption for office workers?

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This article also posted on my 021Lab Substack

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The motivation for going incognito with AI in corporate context

Among various user groups, agentic AI currently benefits knowledge workers the most — through automating mundane tasks, executing high-volume analysis in short timeframes, handling multiple workflows, and enabling rapid coding. The introduction of Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) in July 2024 has been widely celebrated by tech enthusiasts and serves as a key differentiator for Claude among its alternatives (OpenAI Agent, Microsoft Copilot, etc.) in the agentic application landscape.

However, since office workers spend nearly one-third of their working days behind corporate networks with near-bulletproof firewalls and proxy servers, using Claude Desktop at work can be quite challenging.

Unless your company DevOps and IT department runs on either a Microsoft Cloud stack that heavily integrated with AI tool via Copilot or a Google Cloud Stack with their flagship AI Gemini — you would definitly missing out on being able to leverage the full potential of a AI assistance with your daily works.

What Incognito Mode Looks like

How to access the Claude Desktop “Private Chat”

When spinning up my Claude Desktop today, I just notice this little pac-man lookalike icon on the top right corner of the app and immediately became intrigued by it.

And being right in the app itself, naturally I just asked Claude itself about what it was.

Here’s its response:

Key Features:

• No conversation storage: Chats in incognito mode aren’t saved to your chat history

• No data retention: Conversations aren’t stored on Anthropic’s servers or used for model training

• No memory: The AI won’t remember details from these chats in future conversations

• Enhanced privacy: Ideal for sensitive or confidential discussions

How it works:

• When active, your conversation appears as temporary and isn’t linked to your account

• Once you close the chat, it’s gone permanently

When to use it:

• Discussing sensitive business information

• Personal matters you don’t want stored

• Confidential documents or data

• Any conversation you want to keep completely private

… But is your chat data indeed being kept “private” during Incognito as how it promise