Read-only bank access arrives in Claude, US beta only

Anthropic on November 5 began rolling out Personal Finance, a beta for Claude subscribers in the US on the Pro, Max and Ultra plans. You link your bank and card accounts, and Claude can then read balances, credit limits and up to two years of transactions from them, but it can’t move, manage or invest money. If you want these chats kept out of model training, ask your questions inside the Personal Finance hub. Only conversations there are excluded, and anything you share in a regular chat falls under your usual privacy settings.

The hub shows up in Claude’s sidebar, and the announcement on Claude’s site suggests starting small: connect one account and ask one question, such as “Can I afford a trip this spring?” Setup steps and the rules on how your data is used and kept are in Anthropic’s Help Center.

What to ask, and what to double-check

You ask in plain language. “Where did my money go this month?” adds up spending across every linked account and sorts it by category. Follow-ups compare against previous months and list the payments still due before payday. Ask whether anything looks off and Claude scans all the connected accounts for charges that hit twice, unexpected fees or a bill that has crept up over the year. It can also explain a term like APR and then total the interest you’ve actually paid, or build a weekly spending chart, a calendar of upcoming bills or a dashboard you keep adjusting.

Anthropic’s own caveat comes with every figure. Claude can make mistakes, so the company suggests asking which transactions sit behind a number and checking important figures with your bank. Personal Finance isn’t designed to give investment advice. It also carries no ads or sponsored recommendations, and Anthropic offers no credit cards, loans or savings accounts of its own through it.

What Claude sees

Accounts connect through Plaid, a service that links apps to banks. You sign in to your bank yourself there, accept Plaid’s terms and approve read-only access, so Claude never asks for or sees your bank password. Plaid connects to more than 12,000 financial institutions, Citi and Chase among them, Engadget reported.

Claude sees only the accounts you choose to connect. For each one it gets the bank’s name, the account’s name, type and last four digits, balances and credit limits, and up to two years of transactions. Once you unlink an account, Claude can no longer see its data.

Next to ChatGPT’s version

OpenAI added similar personal finance tools to ChatGPT in May. They also connect to users’ financial accounts and answer questions ranging from spending patterns to long-term planning, and TechCrunch describes Claude as playing catch-up. Per Engadget, OpenAI also built on Plaid.

Training is where the two differ. ChatGPT’s finance experience follows the account’s existing data controls, so anyone who never changed them is enrolled in training by default. Claude’s hub conversations are excluded whatever your settings say.

Anthropic calls the beta a first step. It says it is exploring how Claude could work with licensed advisers and regulated firms, and it has asked banks, wealth managers and other financial services companies to get in touch. “For life’s bigger money decisions, we think people are best served by Claude working alongside the licensed professionals and regulated firms they trust.”