Now Claude can help with your finances too

Anthropic

Anthropic has begun testing a new personal finance experience inside of Claude. Starting this week, Pro, Max and Ultra subscribers in the US can connect their financial accounts to Claude in order to get personalized financial advice from the chatbot. Like OpenAI did with ChatGPT Finances in May, Anthropic has partnered with Plaid to allow users to connect their bank accounts. Plaid's backend has connections to more than 12,000 financial institutions, including many major US banks like Citi and Chase.

When you connect a financial account to Claude, Anthropic notes the chatbot will be limited to read-only access. "Personal Finance can't move, manage or invest your money," the company says, adding it didn't design the tool to give people investment advice, and that Claude can only access up to two years of transactions.

Anthropic is also quick to distance its offering from OpenAI's, pointing to the company's ad policy. "Personal Finance has no ads or sponsored recommendations, and it doesn't offer credit cards, loans or savings accounts of its own, so your money questions get a straight answer," Anthropic says. Additionally, the company says it won't use any conversations you have inside the Personal Finance hub for model training. "For anything you share with Claude outside the hub, your privacy settings apply," it adds. Again, this is different from OpenAI, which applies your existing data control settings to ChatGPT's personal finance experience, meaning if you don't modify them, you're enrolled in model training by default.

Outside of those differences, the two tools appear to offer broadly the same features. You can ask Claude to look through your accounts to spot unexpected fees, double-charges and any monthly bills that have gone up over the year. It can also generate weekly spending charts, expense calendars and budget breakdowns. And if there are any terms you're not familiar with, like say APR, you can ask Claude to explain those too.

Looking forward, Anthropic says it's exploring how Claude can work alongside licensed professionals and regulated firms to offer financial advice. Just what that might look like, the company doesn't say, but it's asking that banks and wealth managers get in touch. The timing of today's announcement probably has a lot to do with Anthropic's impending IPO, which the company is expected to complete sometime in the next few weeks.