What should you do before moving staff from personal Claude accounts to Team?

Before you send a single invitation to your company's Team plan, find out who already uses Claude on a personal account and ask each of them for the skills they've built. Skills don't come with a person when they move their account into Team. On Team you can't move anyone's account for them either, so each person decides what to bring, and moving their chats in can't be undone.

The Claude details in this post come from Anthropic's own pages, as of October 2026.

The people already paying for Claude themselves know which jobs it helps with at your company, so they're the right place to start. For the rest of a first setup, see how to set up Claude for your company.

Can you move their accounts into Team yourself?

No. Anthropic's page on moving a personal account describes two routes. A person can move their own account into a Team or Enterprise organization, which is Anthropic's word for a company account. Or an admin can claim every personal account on the company's email domain, and that route is Enterprise only. The table on Claude's pricing page agrees, with "Migrate accounts using your domains" marked No for Team. Anthropic changed the help page on the day we read it, October 30, 2026, so check it again before you act.

Enterprise is Anthropic's larger plan, and we compare the two in our post on whether a 40-person company should choose Team or Enterprise.

The move also depends on the email address and on how the person pays. Anthropic describes it for a personal account on the same email address the person uses in your organization. Someone who signed up with a home address will end up with two accounts, and the page describes no way to merge them, so they'll need to copy out anything they want to keep. A paid personal plan bought directly from Anthropic or through Google Play is canceled when the person closes their personal account to join you, with a refund for the unused time. One bought through Apple's App Store isn't. The person has to cancel that one in their Apple ID settings or Apple keeps charging them, and until they do, keeping both accounts is the only choice Claude offers them.

What moves with an account, and what stays behind

A person's chats, projects, uploaded files and Claude's memory from their chats move with them, unless your company has turned memory off. A project is a space in Claude that keeps the files and standing instructions for one piece of work together. Amit writes about using projects as a team's shared memory in Claude Projects for team collaboration. Sign-ins to connected apps, meaning tools like a shared drive that Claude can reach for the person, don't carry over and need setting up again. Custom connections they added themselves have to be added again, and your company's settings may not allow them. Public links to chats stop working, and Cowork sessions, where Claude carries out tasks for the person, don't move either.

Skills stay behind too. In Anthropic's words, "There's no migration path for skills." A skill is a set of written instructions Claude follows for one job, such as turning call notes into a proposal the way your company writes them, and there's more on them in our post on Claude skills. Skills are the part we'd worry about, because each one holds what a person has worked out about doing one job well. Gathered in one place, they're the start of a skill library your company owns.

Ask what people built before you invite them

1. Find out who uses Claude on their own, which email address each person signed up with, and whether they pay through Apple. Expense claims for Claude subscriptions are one place to look.

2. Ask each person which skills and projects they rely on, and get a copy of every skill.

3. Keep the copies somewhere the company owns, with a note of who made each one.

4. Tell your IT team or outside IT company before invitations go out, since accounts and sign-in are theirs to look after.

5. Send the invitations.

Anthropic's page says to export any skill you want to keep before moving. A skill goes into Claude as a ZIP file of a folder, so if someone built theirs from a folder on their computer, that folder is the copy to keep. If a skill was made inside Claude with no folder behind it, the Anthropic pages we read don't say how to get a copy out, so ask Anthropic before that person moves.

Say Priya in operations has a skill that turns supplier emails into purchase orders. Priya is an example, not a client. If she accepts her invitation and brings her data with her, her chats arrive and the skill doesn't. If she sends you the folder first, she can upload it to her company seat. A Team member can share a skill with colleagues or publish it for everyone in the company, and your settings decide whether someone reviews it before it's published.

Should their personal chats come too?

Only if each person is happy for them to stay in the company account for good. Anthropic's page says "Bringing your work into a Team or Enterprise workspace is one-way." If someone's account mixes work with home life, like a medical question or a family budget, they can keep both accounts, which leaves the personal one active and separate. Or they can close the personal account without bringing anything, and start the company one empty.

Work chats should end up in the company account. On personal plans, Anthropic can use chats to improve Claude if the person's model training setting allows it, according to its page on model training. The Team plan on the pricing page lists "No model training on your content by default".

Ask Anthropic one more thing before anyone moves: will the chats they bring show up in your company's data export? Only the Primary Owner, the person named as the top owner of your company's Claude account, can export the organization's data, and that export includes conversation data. Moved chats go into the company workspace. No Anthropic page we read says outright whether the chats a person brought with them are part of that export. We haven't tested it, so check before you tell staff what to expect. The pages we read describe exports, not an owner reading anyone's chats at will.

The same choice faces you if you create the Team plan from your own Pro or Max account. Claude may show a "Keep your personal account separate" box during the upgrade. If you leave it unchecked, your account is upgraded in place, and some of your content carries over to the Team plan with no way to move it back. Check the box if your own chats should stay yours.

If company information is in personal accounts today

A security lead would tell you to get company information out of personal accounts before anything else, since it's going into them now. If your people handle patient records, client money or other data with legal rules attached, that's right, and it comes first.

On Team, existing personal accounts stay under each person's control. Claiming accounts is Enterprise only, so stopping means asking people to stop. You can do that and ask what they built on the same day. What we'd avoid is a ban with no company account ready to use, and Amit has written about why banning AI tools on its own tends not to work.

If you'd like help with the move, or with setting Claude up afterward, tell us about your team.