You have spent months teaching ChatGPT who you are. That context feels impossible to leave behind.
The 2-minute memory import
The 20-minute deep export with Cowork
Three ways to use your Cowork profile.md
Converting Custom GPTs to Claude Skills
This newsletter gives you the complete migration process. Export your memories, transfer your full conversation history, and convert your Custom GPTs. Every prompt is copy-paste ready.
Everything in this newsletter is tested. I ran every workflow, hit every error, and documented what worked. If you're new here, welcome. If you've been reading a while, thank you. Your subscription keeps this going.
ChatGPT → Claude
The one thing keeping most people on ChatGPT is context debt.
You have spent months or years teaching a model who you are, how you communicate, what you care about. Starting over on a new platform means going back to generic output. That sunk cost is real, and it is the main reason people stay.
Anthropic just made it a two-minute job.
Claude now has a memory import feature. You export your entire ChatGPT context in a code block and drop it into Claude’s memory. The whole transfer takes about two minutes.
Before you run the export, do this first. Go to ChatGPT Settings > Personalization and manually copy your Custom Instructions into a separate document.
These are the standing rules you wrote telling ChatGPT how to behave - tone preferences, output formats, things it should always or never do. They live separately from stored memories and the export prompts below will not capture them. Copy them now, then paste them into Claude at Settings > General > Personal Preferences.
Step 1. Export your ChatGPT context.
Open ChatGPT and paste this exact prompt:
Export all of my stored memories and any context you’ve learned about me from past conversations. Preserve my words verbatim where possible, especially for instructions and preferences.
## Categories (output in this order):
1. **Instructions**: Rules I’ve explicitly asked you to follow going forward — tone, format, style, “always do X”, “never do Y”, and corrections to your behavior. Only include rules from stored memories, not from conversations.
2. **Identity**: Name, age, location, education, family, relationships, languages, and personal interests.
3. **Career**: Current and past roles, companies, and general skill areas.
4. **Projects**: Projects I meaningfully built or committed to. Ideally ONE entry per project. Include what it does, current status, and any key decisions. Use the project name or a short descriptor as the first words of the entry.
5. **Preferences**: Opinions, tastes, and working-style preferences that apply broadly.
## Format:
Use section headers for each category. Within each category, list one entry per line, sorted by oldest date first. Format each line as:
[YYYY-MM-DD] - Entry content here.
If no date is known, use [unknown] instead.
## Output:
- Wrap the entire export in a single code block for easy copying.
- After the code block, state whether this is the complete set or if more remain.
Copy the entire code block it returns.
Step 2. Import it into Claude.
Go to Settings > Capabilities. Find the Memory section. Click “Start import.” Drop your ChatGPT export into the text box and hit “Add to memory.”
Claude extracts the key information and stores it as individual rules. Your new assistant now knows everything your old one did.
Two minutes. The sunk cost argument is gone.
Step 3. Go further with Cowork.
The memory import captures what ChatGPT stored about you. But if you want to extract everything, your actual conversation history is where the real context lives.
OpenAI lets you export your full data at Settings > Data Controls > Export Data. You get a zip file containing conversations.json, which is every message you have ever sent. Mine was 267MB covering 2,992 conversations from July 2024 to February 2026.
I dropped it into Cowork and ran this prompt:
