Claude Personal Finance: What the AI sees in your bank account

Anthropic has given Claude a way into its users' finances. A new feature called Personal Finance connects checking accounts, credit cards, loans and investment accounts to the AI assistant. Claude can then answer questions such as "Where did my money go this month?" from real transactions. According to Anthropic's announcement on November 5, the beta is rolling out this week in the US only, on the Pro, Max and Ultra plans. It is coming to the web, the desktop app, iOS and Android in stages. Free, Team and Enterprise accounts do not get it. OpenAI added similar finance tools to ChatGPT in May, also built on Plaid and also limited to Pro subscribers in the US at launch.

Users elsewhere will not see the feature for now. Anthropic's help article limits it to US banks and says Personal Finance stays hidden outside the US, including for people using a VPN that connects from another country. Anthropic has not given a date for other regions.

What Claude reads from your accounts

Claude connects to banks through Plaid. You sign in to your bank on Plaid's screen, so Anthropic says Claude never asks for or sees the password. For each account you share, Claude reads the bank's name, the account name and type, the last four digits of the account number, balances and credit limits. It also gets up to 24 months of transactions with the amount, date, merchant, category and the bank's own description. Anthropic notes that some banks put a full account number into an account name or a transaction description, and Claude can see it there.

For investments, loans and cards, Claude only reads balances and limits. Holdings, trades, interest rates and loan terms are left out. Access is read-only, so Claude cannot make transfers, close accounts or invest money. Anthropic adds that Personal Finance is not designed to give investment advice and that Claude can get figures wrong. Balances can be a day or two old, so the company recommends checking important numbers against your bank's app or statements.

Where your bank data goes

Anthropic says it does not use conversations in the Personal Finance hub to train its models. Claude can also read your linked accounts in regular chats without asking each time, and those chats follow your normal privacy settings. If you have not opted out of AI training, do that before you link a bank. Plaid can be switched off for chats in the Connectors menu, and the mobile apps can also make Claude ask before each read.

Figures stay in your chat history until you delete the chat. A shared chat link shows them too. If Claude builds an artifact such as a spending dashboard, everyone who opens it sees the numbers, and the help article says the artifact stays even after the original chat is deleted. Unlinking a bank stops future access, but it does not delete earlier answers, artifacts or shared links. You have to remove those yourself. ChatGPT's iCloud Mail connection has the same gap, where disconnecting does not undo everything.

Your subscription matters as well. When a paid plan ends, Personal Finance closes, but the banks stay linked. Anthropic suggests unlinking them before you cancel. You can also revoke access on Plaid's own site at my.plaid.com. Anthropic only unlinks banks automatically when you delete your Claude account.

Anthropic is catching up with OpenAI

TechCrunch describes the launch as Anthropic catching up with ChatGPT. Anthropic calls Personal Finance a first step and is looking for banks, wealth managers and financial services firms to work with on bigger money decisions. Outside the US, the beta cannot be used yet. Our comparison of AI subscriptions covers what each Claude plan costs.