Claude AI can plug directly into your bank account

Jess Weatherbed

is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.

Anthropic has a new pitch for managing your personal finances: let Claude do it instead, with a new Personal Finance feature that connects it to your bank and card accounts via the Plaid bank bridging platform. You can ask the chatbot “where did my money go this month,” for example, and it’ll create an overview with a breakdown of spending by category, including rent and utilities, shopping, and food. Claude can also answer broader questions around what bills are left before your next payday, if you can afford big purchases like holiday trips, and how much money you could be saving each month.

Its access is read-only, and with Plaid facilitating the connection, Claude doesn’t see your banking passwords and your bank doesn’t have to deal with unvetted AI bots crawling around your accounts.

Claude can’t move, manage, or invest your money, according to Anthropic, and it “isn’t designed to give investment advice.”, but it can see the bank’s name, account names, account type, the last four digits of the number associated with it, your balances and credit limits, and up to two years’ worth of your transaction history.

If you choose to give it access to all that, Claude can explain financial terms you don’t understand and answer questions about your balances and transactions.

Personal Finance in Claude is rolling out in beta this week to Claude Pro, Max, and Ultra plan subscribers in the US. Anthropic’s announcement follows OpenAI introducing a similar feature for ChatGPT in May, which also plugs into your bank accounts through Plaid. Allowing AI to have oversight into your finances might ring some alarm bells, but according to the sign-off in Anthropic’s press release, it’s just the beginning:

“Personal Finance is a first step. For life’s bigger money decisions, we think people are best served by Claude working alongside the licensed professionals and regulated firms they trust. We’re exploring how to make that possible in Claude, and we’d like to hear from banks, wealth managers, and financial services companies who want to help shape it.”

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• Jess Weatherbed