How to Restore Chat Access in Google AI Studio? Lost access to my own chat after changing sharing settings to “Restricted” — affects all accounts

[Sonnie]

Hello everyone,

I’m facing a serious issue related to chat access and ownership in Google AI Studio, and I’m hoping someone here may have experienced something similar or knows a solution.

For many months, I’ve been using multiple devices and multiple Google accounts. I regularly shared chats between them using the “Share” feature. All of these chats were copies or continuations of one original chat. Over time — through repeated cycles of editing, saving, and re-sharing between accounts — this evolved into dozens of versions of the same project, stored in each account’s prompt history.

Recently, I used the Share function again. In the sharing settings window, I selected “Anyone with the link” so I could paste the link into my notes and open it from another account. However, right after that, I accidentally switched the setting to “Restricted.” Within a second, I was removed from the sharing window and received a message saying that I no longer have access.

(I’m attaching screenshots. Please ignore the chat title — it was created as an example.)

After that:

The Share window no longer works.

After a long loading time, I get the message: “Sorry, sharing is unavailable at this time.”

If I try to send a message in the chat, any model returns:

“An internal error has occurred”

“Failed to generate content. Please try again.”

Then I realized something much worse — this issue affects ALL of my accounts.

Almost every one of my accounts contains more than twenty versions of this chat at different stages of development. None of them work. Even versions that were last used months ago.

This includes the account where I originally created the chat.

After I clicked “Restricted,” it seems that all of my accounts simultaneously lost access. I cannot:

Use any model in any version of this chat

Share it

Sometimes even save changes

It appears as if I somehow removed access for all of my own accounts, and now none of them have permission to change the sharing settings back. The “Share” button behaves as if I am not the owner — even on the original account.

I suspect that after many cycles of: Save → Share updated version → Open in another account → Save → Share again → and so on, something may have broken in the ownership structure. But I am the only person who ever had access to these chats.

I also tried checking via Google Drive. All accounts are marked as “Owner,” and even after switching the file status to open access there, nothing changes inside AI Studio.

At this point, I completely lost access to months of work. Starting over is not realistically possible — this chat contains extremely important and long-developed content. The work has grown into a huge number of tokens.

If anyone has experienced something similar or knows what might have happened, please let me know. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance — this situation is very important to me.

[Sonnie]

Hi everyone, I found a solution to this problem:

1. Make a copy of the chat.

2. Delete all files that you have ever uploaded to that chat.

3. Save the chat.

4. Click “Share” (it should become available after saving), then enable public access and set the permission to Editor. Save the changes.

5. Profit. All other chats related to this one — whether from long ago or more recent — should become accessible again.

Fortunately, I managed to fix it, and I hope this helps someone someday. Though honestly, I’d rather that no one ever has to deal with this issue.

I’m not exactly sure why this method works. Maybe this problem happened because of some recent bugs. But it seems that when you attach a file to a chat, it somehow interacts with your Google Drive and transfers permissions to the account.

In my case, it looks like all of my accounts lost (or “forgot”) access somehow. Because of that, none of them wanted to work with the files inside the chat, and the chat itself became partially locked. Once I removed all the files, the system seemed to restore a “valid” status for the chat.

The relationships between the chat versions still remain, and from this “working” version you can change the sharing settings again, which also restores access to the older versions.

Good luck to everyone.