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How to use Claude Projects

Pasting the same background into every new Claude chat gets old fast. A project holds your files and standing instructions in one place so every chat inside it starts informed. Here's how to set one up, fill it well and keep it tidy.

Updated 15 October 2026

These steps were checked against Anthropic's help pages on 15 October 2026. Button names may shift as Claude's interface changes.

Create a project

1. Move your pointer over the left edge of Claude to open the sidebar and click Projects. You can also type claude.ai/projects into your browser.
2. Click + New Project in the top right corner.
3. Enter a name and a short description so you can tell your projects apart later.
4. On a Team or Enterprise plan, pick the visibility: keep it private to you and the people you invite, or open it to everyone in your organization if your admins allow that.
5. Create the project and start your first chat from inside it.

Add files to project knowledge

Project knowledge is the panel on the right side of the project page (Anthropic's upload guide calls it the project's Files section). Whatever you put there is available to every chat in the project.

1. Open the project and find the knowledge panel on the right.
2. Click + and upload documents, text files or code snippets.
3. Give Claude a moment to process them. From then on it treats them as background for each conversation in the project.

A few limits apply to files stored in a project, as of October 2026:

• 30 MB per file. That's lower than the limit for files attached to a single chat.
• No fixed file count, but a size ceiling. Everything has to fit inside Claude's context window. On paid plans, Claude switches on retrieval (RAG) by itself when the knowledge gets close to that ceiling, which lets a project hold up to about ten times more. You'll see an indicator when it's on, and Claude will use a project knowledge search tool to look things up.
• Mostly text. Claude pulls only the text out of project files. Anthropic lists multimodal PDFs as the one exception.

Clear file names help, especially once retrieval is on. Anthropic suggests mentioning a document by name in your question when you want Claude to look there first.

Write project instructions

1. On the project page, click Set project instructions.
2. Describe how Claude should behave in this project: the role to take, who the audience is, the tone and the format you want back.
3. Click Save instructions. They now apply to every chat in this project, and nowhere else.

Write them like a brief to a new colleague. For example: "I run a small bakery. Draft social posts in a warm, plain voice for local customers. Keep each post under 60 words and suggest one photo idea." Short, concrete rules beat long essays.

These sit alongside your account-wide Instructions for Claude, which you set in Settings and which apply to every conversation. Keep general preferences there and project-specific context in the project.

Move existing chats into a project

1. Open the chat you want to move.
2. Click the small arrow next to the chat's name and choose Add to project.
3. In the Move chat window, browse or search for the project and click it.

The same menu lets you take a chat out of a project or shift it to a different one.

Keep your project list tidy

• Star projects you use daily: click the three dots on the project's card and pick Star, or click the star icon inside the project. Starred projects show up in the sidebar.
• Archive finished work from the project's three-dot menu. Archived projects drop to the bottom of the list and sit in their own tab on the Projects page.
• Delete a project from the three-dot menu, then confirm with Yes, delete.

Good to know

• Each project has its own memory. With memory on (the default on Free, Pro and Max), Claude combines a project's memory with your general memory but never with another project's. To wall a project off completely, turn off Use account memory under Memory on the project page.
• Shared doesn't mean your chats are public. On Team and Enterprise, people you share a project with see its knowledge and instructions, but nobody else can read your own chats in it unless you share those chats yourself.
• A new version is in beta. As of October 2026, Anthropic is testing a redesigned version of projects, starting in Claude Code for some Pro and Max users. The steps above describe the current version most people see.

Weighing Claude's projects against ChatGPT's or Gemini's? Our comparison of ChatGPT Projects, Claude Projects and Gemini notebooks covers the differences.

If it doesn't work

• You can't create another project. Free accounts stop at five. Reuse a related project, or move to a paid plan, where Anthropic doesn't list that cap.
• Uploads are refused or knowledge is full. Check that each file is under 30 MB. On the free plan, the total must fit the context window, so trim drafts and duplicates or split big documents. Paid plans switch to retrieval automatically.
• Claude forgets a decision from another chat. That's expected. Write the decision into a short document and add it to project knowledge, so every chat can see it.
• You can't share a project. Sharing only exists on Team and Enterprise plans. If an owner has turned it off, the Share menu still opens but says sharing was turned off by your administrator, and you can't add anyone new. Projects that were already shared stay shared, so ask an admin if you need a new share.

When a project turns into a to-do list

Projects give Claude the background, but they don't keep track of which parts of an answer you've acted on. Workbranch is a separate AI workspace, with answers from Google Gemini, that splits each answer into a point-by-point checklist with progress, flags and due dates, inside projects and color-coded folders. It has a 3-day free trial. For a method that works in any tool, see how to turn AI answers into tasks.

Sources

• How can I create and manage projects? (Claude Help Center, checked 15 October 2026)
• What are projects? (Claude Help Center, checked 15 October 2026)
• Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for projects (Claude Help Center, checked 15 October 2026)
• Upload files to Claude (Claude Help Center, checked 15 October 2026)
• Understanding Claude's personalization features (Claude Help Center, checked 15 October 2026)
• Manage project visibility and sharing (Claude Help Center, checked 15 October 2026)

Frequently asked questions