Claude's new Personal Finance tool aims to help analyze your spending - read-only, of course
By Google News Personal Finance ·
You can now share your financial information with Claude and ask the chatbot for insights on your spending.
Also: Researchers asked people to use AI chatbots for election info
Personal Finance in Claude, which Anthropic announced Thursday, reviews your connected accounts through read-only access via Plaid. That security measure follows OpenAI’s equivalent feature, ChatGPT Finances, which launched in May. Here’s what to know.
Functionally, this feature appears similar to ChatGPT Finances: It lets you link as many bank and credit card accounts as you’d like to Claude via Plaid with read-only access. You can then ask Claude where you spent your money this month or whether you can afford to take a vacation in six months, for example.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Also: Stop sharing your passwords with AI agents
According to Anthropic, the feature is a response to existing use patterns: the company’s April usage report found that financial advice was one of the main topics users ask Claude for help with.
Given the privacy concerns around sharing sensitive data with AI systems, especially agents, Anthropic emphasized which data the new feature will access and how.
“For the accounts you choose to connect (and only those), Claude sees the bank’s name, each account’s name, type, and last four digits, balances and credit limits, and up to two years of transactions. When you chat with Claude in the Personal Finance hub, those conversations aren’t used to train our models.”
That last part is important: Personal Finance in Claude is its own mode with its own protections. If you share or discuss your financial data with Claude outside that “hub,” it’s subject only to your Claude privacy settings.
The idea behind the feature is that you can ask follow-up questions and request more insights about spending habits, trends over time, and future goals based on what Claude finds, similar to any other Claude conversation. The tool will also generate tables and charts to visualize your financial information.
“You can ask for a weekly spending chart, a calendar of what’s due, or a dashboard of the numbers you choose, and Claude builds it as an artifact you can keep adjusting and coming back to,” an Anthropic representative told ZDNET via email.
Also: I connected ChatGPT to my bank, and it’s my go-to finance app now
You can also expect an ad-free experience in the feature.
“Like the rest of Claude, 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,” the company said in the announcement.
The company added that because Claude is using actual transaction data and not memory, the feature shouldn’t hallucinate.
“It can list the exact transactions behind any number so you can check its math,” Anthropic said via email. “Like any AI, it can make mistakes, so for anything important, we recommend confirming with your bank.”
For now, Personal Finance in Claude is available only to Pro, Max, and Ultra subscribers in the US. Given the many finance apps out there, it may primarily be for users who already use Claude for much of their work and day-to-day and don’t want to switch interfaces.
Still, the difference — and for many, the appeal — here is the natural language interface…
Originally published by Google News Personal Finance
