You sent a Claude Slides deck with 'anyone with the link' and your client got a sign-up screen. Why that happens, what Docs, Slides and Design actually export, and how to get the work in front of someone who will never make a Claude account.
You built the proposal in Claude Slides. It looks good. You hit Share, set it to anyone with the link, pasted the link into an email and sent it.
The reply comes back an hour later: "It's asking me to create a Claude account?"
They aren't going to. They're a bakery owner, or a procurement lead, or a founder who uses a different AI tool and has no reason to sign up for yours just to read your deck. So the question is how to get the same work in front of them without the sign-up screen.
Because that's how Anthropic built the Share dialog for its newer formats, and they say so plainly.
The Share dialog covers Claude Docs, Slides and Design. Anthropic's help article on publishing and sharing says that a Claude account is required to open what you share there, even for someone who has the link. Their Claude Docs article says the same thing in one sentence:
Opening a shared doc requires a Claude account.
The "anyone with the link" setting decides who is allowed in. Per Anthropic's pages, it doesn't take the sign-in away. That's a reasonable design for a product where the shared thing lives inside someone's account — it just isn't what you pictured when you pasted the link into a client email.
What Anthropic's help centre said, checked on 19 September 2026 (their product, their wording to change — open the current page before relying on this):
| What the help page says | |
|---|---|
| Docs, Slides, Design shared from the Share dialog | The person opening it needs a Claude account, even with the link |
| Claude Docs on Team and Enterprise | "Anyone with the link" isn't available for Docs yet |
| Opening without an account | Anthropic describes that for Publish on chat artifacts in the older experience, not for Docs, Slides or Design |
If the older chat-artifact Publish is what you'd normally reach for, it's worth knowing which Claude shares are public and what unsharing undoes — a public page and a client deliverable want different things.
The way round the sign-in is to stop sharing the thing inside Claude and send a file that came out of it. Here's what the export menus offered when we ran all three on a Max account:
Seen in the claude.ai interface on 18 September 2026 (menus change; go by what yours shows, and Anthropic's help pages are the reference):
| Format | Export options we saw | What to send a client with no account |
|---|---|---|
| Docs | Word, PDF, Markdown, Google Docs, Notion | |
| Slides | PowerPoint, PDF, HTML | PDF, or HTML |
| Design | HTML, PDF | HTML (desktop), PDF (phone) |
Two notes on that table. Anthropic's Slides help page lists PowerPoint and PDF; the HTML option was in the menu when we exported, so it may be newer than the page. And Anthropic's Design page lists more options than the two we downloaded — we only tested HTML and PDF, so those are the only ones we're describing here.
What we don't take: .pptx, .docx and .md are turned away at the upload step. That's deliberate rather than a gap we're about to fill — converting a PowerPoint into a web page faithfully is a problem we haven't solved, and pretending otherwise would just move the breakage to your client's screen. Export the PDF instead.
Exported the PDF already? Drop it in and you get a link your client can open without signing up for anything. No account needed for the upload either.
If you want to know what that looks like from the other side of the email, here's what your client sees when they open a private link, step by step.
In the Slides PDF we exported, every slide was a single image — each one a 3840×2160 picture of the slide rather than text laid out on a page. It reads crisply, including the small print in a timeline table. But there is no text in it to select, copy or search. If your client is the kind who pastes a line from your proposal into their reply, that matters.
It also makes the file heavier than you'd guess: our five-slide deck came out at 1.57 MB. Worth a glance at the size before you pick where to put it (sizes are further down).
The Docs PDF is a different export — a four-page Doc came out at 138 KB for us, and all four pages rendered without trouble on the other end.
Yes, if your export menu has it. The Slides HTML we got is a self-contained slide player — you click through it like a presentation instead of scrolling pages — and it includes the setting that tells phones to fit it to the screen. It uploaded as-is and opened without an account.
Which to send is about how your client will read it. A PDF scrolls like a document, which is how most people read a deck someone emailed them. The HTML behaves like the deck you presented. Neither is wrong.
Design's HTML export is the cleaner of the two for a screen: in the one we exported, fonts were embedded and it made no outside requests, so it looked the same on a stranger's network as it did in Claude.
The catch is width. That export was a fixed 1440-pixel artboard with no mobile setting, so on a narrow screen your client scrolls sideways to see it. (Our prompt asked for a desktop layout, which may have shaped that.) If you know they'll open it on a phone, send the Design PDF instead. If it's going to a laptop, the HTML is the better experience — the steps for turning an exported file into one private link are here.
These are our own limits, straight from how the product is set up today:
A text-heavy Doc fits anywhere on that list. An image-heavy Slides PDF is the one to check. If the review has a natural end — a pitch window, a proposal deadline — you can let the link expire on its own rather than remembering to take it down.
Sometimes, yes — and it's worth saying which times.
The link route is for the case in the middle: a person who needs to read your work, today, and has no reason to sign up for anything to do it.
You sent a client the public link to a Claude Code artifact and asked them to mark up what to change. There's nowhere to comment. That's by design. Here's the rule, which plans it leaves without a comment option for outside viewers, and how to collect pinned notes anyway. Checked against Anthropic's docs on 15 September 2026.
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