# Interactive artifact

**Source:** https://promtable.com/glossary/interactive-artifact

> An interactive artifact is a live-rendered HTML / React / SVG / Mermaid surface inside an LLM chat — Claude Artifacts and OpenAI Canvas popularized the pattern in 2024-2026, turning chat from text into running mini-apps.

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An interactive artifact is a live-rendered HTML / React / SVG / Mermaid surface inside an LLM chat — Claude Artifacts and OpenAI Canvas popularized the pattern in 2024-2026, turning chat from text into running mini-apps.

Pre-Artifacts, chat answers were text. Artifacts let the model emit a runnable React component, an SVG diagram, an HTML demo, a Mermaid graph — and the client renders it live in the sidebar. The user can iterate on it ('make the button blue'), version it, share it. Engineering challenges: sandboxed render (untrusted React code can't access auth tokens), library availability (which React libs ship in the sandbox?), persistence (artifacts survive across conversations), sharing (publish to a public URL). By 2026 the pattern is mainstream — Claude Artifacts, OpenAI Canvas, v0 (Vercel), Bolt, Lovable, Replit — and powers a new category of throwaway / shareable interactive prototypes.

## When to use

- Building shareable interactive demos.
- Quick visualizations or one-off UIs.

## Common mistakes

- Treating artifacts as production code — they're prototypes, not maintainable apps.
- Pasting auth tokens into artifacts — sandbox blocks most exfiltration but not all.

## Related terms

- [live-preview](https://promtable.com/glossary/live-preview)
- [generative-ui](https://promtable.com/glossary/generative-ui)

*Last updated: 2026-06-01*
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Original page: https://promtable.com/glossary/interactive-artifact
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