The standalone Claude Design site at claude.ai/design closes on December 14, 2026. After that date, the address opens Claude. Anthropic’s announcement gives the reason in one sentence: “Running two versions slows down fixes for both, so we’re folding the standalone site into Claude.”
The migration that Anthropic offers moves design systems. It does not move projects. And the parts of your work that live only in the standalone product — the chats, the comments, the originals — have a deletion date, not a transfer path. This is the procedure for a team that has brand systems and client one-pagers in there, in the order the steps have to happen.
What gets deleted, exactly
Anthropic’s migration guide names the deletion list in two bullets: “Your chats with Claude” and “Comments on your projects and design systems.” Those stay in the standalone version and are deleted after it closes, per Anthropic’s data retention practices.
Your originals are a separate statement, in the guide’s FAQ: they keep working in the standalone version until it closes on December 14, 2026, and “after that, they’re deleted.” A design system you migrate leaves its original behind in the standalone product, unchanged — and that original is on the same clock.
Public links to standalone projects are a third outcome, and the guide words it differently on purpose: they “will no longer work after it closes.” Not deleted — dead. Every client you sent a public project link to holds a URL with an expiry date.
The instruction Anthropic prints is the whole strategy for this section: save anything you need from your chats and comments before the standalone version closes. No fetched Anthropic page documents an export for chats or comments. The capture that matches the documentation is a screenshot of each comment thread and a copy of the chat text, done by hand.
The dangerous sentence: “You don’t need to do anything with your projects yet”
That sentence is in the migration guide, and it is true — your projects keep working in the standalone version until the close. It is also the sentence that will get client work deleted, because projects are the files with no migration path and a deadline.
The Artifacts page in Claude lists up to 60 of your standalone projects, and they open in the standalone version. That list is a directory back into the product that is closing. It is not a move, and it is not a complete inventory if your team has made more than 60 projects. Anthropic’s position, in the guide’s words: “More details about moving your projects to Claude are coming soon.” Soon is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and December 14 is 56 days out.
So the inventory step happens in the standalone product itself, not on the Artifacts list. Walk the standalone library for every client one-pager, deck, and brand system — including everything past the first 60 the Artifacts page shows.
Before anyone clicks Migrate: the sharing problem
One migration brings over every design system in your organization, including other people’s. It only needs to be started once — and anyone who can use Claude Design can start it, not just the organization’s owners. On individual plans there is no confirmation step at all: click, and it starts.
The consequence that matters for a shop holding more than one client’s brand: “Published design systems that aren’t private will be shared with everyone in your organization and appear in their design system menu.” A system you published so your own projects would use it becomes an entry in every teammate’s menu the moment anyone runs the migration. On individual plans, nothing is shared — this is a team and organization trap, not a solo one.
The precaution has to happen before the first click, because undoing it is not documented. In the standalone product, the setup guide names the Published toggle as the control that makes a system the organization’s working system. For every design system that should not appear in the whole organization’s menu, turn that toggle off first. A second migration is not a way back: a later run leaves an unchanged system alone and skips one that has changed inside Claude, so neither pass pulls a system out of the menu.
Two kinds of systems do not migrate at all, no matter who clicks: “Empty design systems aren’t migrated, and neither are ones made from a built-in starter theme, even if you’ve edited them.” If your house brand began life as a starter theme you customized, the migration will silently leave it behind. There is no documented design-system export to fall back on. Copy the source assets out by hand before December 14.
The export drill: one project, one zip
There is no bulk download. Anthropic’s FAQ is blunt: “Not all at once. You can download them one at a time.” Open the project in the standalone version, click Share, choose “Project HTML” — for a slide deck, that item hides under “More formats and apps” — keep “Project archive” selected, and click Export.
You get a .zip file with every file in the project. It is free and does not count toward your usage limits. Repeat it for every client one-pager and deck you cannot afford to lose, and store the zips outside Claude.
Know what the zip is not. It is documented as every file in the project. Chats are on the deletion list, and no Anthropic page says the conversation comes along inside the archive. The zip preserves the files. The reasoning your team talked through in chat, and the client’s comments on the work, survive only if you captured them in the previous step.
Enterprise: three switches, and one hard stop
On Enterprise plans the migration is gated by settings that are easy to flatten into one wrong sentence, so take them separately. Artifacts themselves must be on — if they are off, people cannot migrate anything and will not even see the “Claude Design lives here now” banner.
Design systems are a separate template switch: on for Team plans, off for Enterprise until an owner turns on Design systems in Organization settings > Artifacts. That is a different switch from Design and Slides, which Anthropic’s pages say were set to turn on by default on October 15, 2026 — a date that has now passed, with the help text still printing the scheduled sentence, so check your own settings rather than assuming either state. On plans with custom roles, each role also needs the Artifacts permissions, and a design system cannot be migrated if its owner’s role does not include design systems.
The hard stop: “Organizations with zero data retention (ZDR) can’t turn on artifacts, so they can’t migrate.” If that is your organization, the migration procedure does not exist for you. The guide’s path is the per-project download, done before the close, one zip at a time.
One more setting that does not do what an admin might hope: the Enterprise custom-retention article states that custom retention periods “do not apply to Claude Design.” The retention dial your organization already configured is not the instrument that keeps or deletes standalone chats, comments, or originals. The closure is.
After it lands
A migrated design system keeps its files as they were, and it cannot be hand-edited on its page yet. Its editors see the note: “Migrated from the standalone version. Ask Claude to make changes.” The editing model for a migrated brand system is a conversation, not a settings page.
If someone edits a migrated system inside Claude and you later run the migration again, that system is listed under Skipped — “changed on claude.ai, left as they are” — so your edits are not overwritten. Replacing it with a fresh copy is a deliberate act: duplicate it first if the Claude-side changes matter, delete it in Claude, then migrate again.
New design work lives in three doors now: any chat (ask for a design, or Output > Design in the message box), the Artifacts tab, and Claude Code, with /design to create, edit, and sync designs and /design-sync to pull in your design system. All of it draws on the same usage pool as the rest of Claude, including Claude Code — the separate weekly Claude Design allowance the product launched with is already gone, per the get-started guide.
Two gaps in the new home are worth knowing before you move the team: Claude Design does not have version history yet, and inline comments there occasionally fail to appear on the page — Anthropic’s own workaround is to paste the feedback into the chat instead. The standalone product’s comment threads, the ones being deleted in December, are still the reliable record until you screenshot them.
The order is the procedure
Inventory in the standalone product. Turn off Published on anything that must not become an organization-wide menu entry. Mark the empty and starter-theme systems the migration will refuse, and copy their assets out by hand. Export every project that matters, one zip at a time. Screenshot the comments and copy the chats. Only then — owners having turned on Artifacts, Design systems, and the role permissions — does one person click Migrate, read the results window, and fix any failed system in the standalone product before running it again.
Do those steps in that order and December 14 is a non-event: the address starts opening Claude, and everything you cared about is already there or already saved. Do them out of order — migrate first, inventory later — and the button will happily move the systems while the projects, comments, and originals sit in a product with 56 days left on it. We track vendor surface changes like this one on the desk because the procedure is always in the help pages; it is just never in the announcement. The announcement for this closure said chats and comments “won’t be available.” The help center is the text that says deleted.
Sources: Anthropic’s migration guide, Migrate from standalone Claude Design to Claude, and the get-started guide, Get started with Claude Design, both read in full on October 19, 2026. A related surface change, worked the same way: Cursor’s shareable canvases, and how we check a vendor’s what’s-new claims in What’s New in Cursor Is a Claim.
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