How do you carry context between ChatGPT and Claude?

Neither assistant can read the other's memory, so it has to live outside both. The real question is where.

The short answer

There's no way to move it directly. Claude can't read what ChatGPT remembers, and ChatGPT can't read Claude's. Neither service reaches into the other's storage, and neither is going to.

So if you want to pick up where you left off, it has to sit somewhere outside both of them. The real question isn't "how do I move it" — it's where should it live.

Does this sound familiar?

Using two assistants means explaining the same thing twice, and losing track of which one you told what:

• You work something out with ChatGPT, then summarize and paste it so you can ask Claude about it.
• You keep code in one and writing in the other, and neither knows what the other has seen.
• You lose track of which one you told what, so you explain it to both.

Why neither side can fix this

Each assistant's built-in memory works only inside that service. ChatGPT's is attached to your ChatGPT account. Claude's Projects live in Claude. Both are well built, and neither was made to read the other.

That isn't anyone's failing — it's the obvious outcome. Each was built for its own users, and there's no reason for one to go reading a competitor's storage.

Which means this doesn't get fixed by either of them shipping a feature. It gets fixed outside both.

What people do, and what each one costs

Explaining it again. The most common approach by far. Fine when it's short. Once it isn't, you spend more time setting up than working.

Exporting. ChatGPT will hand over your data. What you get is an archive of your account and all of your chats, and not right away — it's prepared, then emailed to you as a link, and the link expires after 24 hours. That's a real backup. It is not a way to hand one thing to another assistant.

Picking one and staying there. Commit to a single assistant and the problem disappears. In exchange you give up whatever the other one is better at, and moving later gets harder the longer you wait.

Keeping it in a workspace tool. Plenty of people file things in Notion or something like it. If that's already where you work, it's a natural place for this.

So where should it live?

There are two honest answers: the workspace you already use, or a store nobody opens.

One is the workspace you already use. If you're in Notion or something like it all day, that's the obvious spot. The catch is that it's a place you go into as well. As conversation notes pile up, you open it one day and find an unsorted heap — and you end up tidying it. Which was the thing you were trying to avoid.

There's a cost either way. If you already work there, your documents and projects now share space with a stream of chat dumps. If you don't, you're adopting a whole workspace app to solve this one thing, and the only thing in that account will be the heap. Which one fits comes down to two things you can't see at a glance.

The other is a store nobody opens. No one goes in to read it, so it doesn't matter that it's untidy. Same mess — it's only a problem on one side, and the difference is whether anyone's looking. Assistants reach it over MCP, an open standard, which is what lets more than one of them use the same store.

You save once; the assistants you've connected do the retrieving. Nothing to file now, nothing to clean up later. A store shaped like that is called a knowledge layer, and Contextick is one.

Claude and ChatGPT both connect on their free plans — here's how.

What this doesn't do

What comes back is only what you saved, and only in the shape you saved it.

Your past conversations don't travel over wholesale. What travels is what you saved. And saving a whole conversation verbatim isn't the way to do it — a long one gets split into pieces, and it comes back in pieces later.

What works is keeping the conclusion once you've reached one. When a conversation lands somewhere, say "summarize what we've worked out and save it to Contextick." That's the shape that's easiest to find again when you ask about it months later. What to save, and when is its own post.

Beyond that:

• Each assistant stays itself. Tone, settings, what it's good at — that's theirs. What's shared is only what you chose to keep.
• What you get back depends on what you saved. It finds what's closest in meaning, so a thin note comes back thin — and a note that says what you decided and why comes back useful.

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