How to Clear Clipboard History on a Mac

What macOS's clipboard does

Copy something, and it sits in the pasteboard (Apple's term for the clipboard) as plain data, no history, no log, no built-in viewer. It stays there until one of three things happens: you copy something else, which overwrites it, an app clears it programmatically, or the Mac restarts.

That single-item, no-history design is the more private default compared to systems that keep a running log. The privacy issue isn't accumulation, it's that whatever you copied last stays there, in full, for as long as you leave it. If that was a password, a card number, or an API key, it's sitting in memory, readable by any app that asks, until something replaces it.

How to clear it manually

There's no menu item for this. The practical fix is to copy something harmless over whatever's there:

pbcopy < /dev/null

Run that in Terminal and it overwrites the clipboard with nothing. It's the closest thing macOS has to a clear button, and it's a command line away rather than a click.

Restarting also clears it, since the pasteboard is held in memory and doesn't survive a reboot. Not exactly a quick fix if all you need is to clear a password.

Why this matters more than it sounds like

Password managers routinely copy your password to the clipboard so you can paste it into a login field. Most of them clear it automatically after a short window, 30 to 90 seconds is typical, specifically because they know what's sitting there otherwise. If you copy a password manually rather than through a manager, nothing clears it for you.

Any app can read it

There's no permission prompt for reading the clipboard on macOS, the way there's for camera or microphone access. Any running app can call the same API and read whatever's currently copied, silently, with no notification to you. That's by design, it's how paste works, and it's also why leaving something sensitive sitting there for longer than necessary is worth avoiding.