How to move a ChatGPT conversation into Claude

There are four ways, and three of them are free and have nothing to do with us. They are below in order of how much of the conversation survives, because that is the only thing that actually differs between them.

The four ways, worst to best

1. 01

   Ask ChatGPT to summarise it, then paste the summary

   This is the one everybody tries first and it is the worst of the four. A summary keeps the conclusions and throws away the corrections, the ideas you rejected, and the way you actually phrase things. Claude then reads about your work instead of having been there, and confidently repeats the assumption you spent forty minutes talking ChatGPT out of.

   Use it only when the conversation is genuinely long and genuinely settled, and you want the outcome rather than the reasoning.

2. 02

   Select all, copy, paste

   Click at the top of the conversation, scroll to the bottom, shift-click, copy. Paste into Claude under a line like “This is a conversation I had with ChatGPT. Read it, then carry on from the end.”

   That framing line matters more than it looks. Without it Claude receives a wall of dialogue with no brief and often starts critiquing the conversation rather than continuing it.

   The real limit is not quality, it is friction. It works fine once. It is miserable on a 200-message thread, and it does nothing at all for the case where what you need is spread across several chats.

3. 03

   Export your ChatGPT data and paste from the file

   In ChatGPT, open Settings, then Data controls, then Export data. OpenAI emails you a link to a zip archive. Inside it is conversations.json containing everything you have ever asked.

   The export is complete, which is its advantage, and it is also JSON, which is its problem: finding one conversation in it is a search through a single enormous file, and the email does not always arrive quickly.

   Worth doing once regardless. It is your data and having a copy of it costs nothing.

4. 04

   Use a tool that already has all of it

   This is what we build, so read it as an interested party. Sidq is a Mac app that reads the AI conversations already on your machine and hands any of them to any other assistant with one keystroke, word for word.

   What it changes over option 2 is not fidelity, it is that you stop doing it by hand: no selecting, no scrolling, and the framing line is written for you. It also drops the greetings and the ok-thanks, and if the conversation is bigger than the window it is going into, it carries what matters and names what it left, in the file, where Claude reads it.

   Nothing is uploaded. The conversations are read from your own disk and go to your own clipboard, and it works with the wifi off.

What actually transfers, and what does not

Going the other way, or anywhere else

More questions: how Sidq reads each assistant · what it costs