Claude can now read your bank accounts and answer money questions with Personal Finance

The skim

• Anthropic's new Personal Finance feature lets Claude read your bank and credit card accounts and answer questions like "Where did my money go this month?"
• Access is read-only through Plaid. Claude can't move, manage or invest money, and it never sees your bank password, but it does see balances, credit limits and up to two years of transactions.
• It's rolling out in beta this week to Claude Pro, Max and Ultra subscribers in the US.

What happened

Anthropic announced Personal Finance in Claude on Thursday. You connect accounts by signing in to your bank yourself through Plaid, the service many budgeting apps already use, and approve read-only access. After that, you can ask Claude about your money in plain language.

Anthropic's example: ask where your money went, and Claude totals spending across your connected accounts and sorts it by category, such as rent and utilities or food and drink. Follow-ups like "Is that more than usual?" or "So what's left before payday?" make it compare past months and list bills still due. It can also flag charges that hit twice, unexpected fees and bills that have crept up, explain terms like APR and add up the interest you've paid, and build spending charts, bill calendars or dashboards.

When the feature reaches your account, Personal Finance shows up in Claude's sidebar. Anthropic suggests connecting one account and asking a single question to start.

What Claude can see

• For each account you connect: the bank's name, the account name, type and last four digits, balances and credit limits, and up to two years of transactions.
• Chats inside the Personal Finance hub aren't used to train Anthropic's models. Anything you share with Claude outside the hub follows your normal privacy settings.
• You can unlink an account anytime, and Claude then loses access to its data.

Why it matters

This is the same pitch OpenAI made in May, when it added a Plaid-powered finance feature to ChatGPT, as The Verge and Engadget note. Anthropic is leaning on two differences. It says Personal Finance "has no ads or sponsored recommendations" and doesn't sell its own cards or loans. And Engadget points out that ChatGPT applies your existing data settings to finance chats, so if you never changed them, those chats can be used for training by default. Claude's finance hub is excluded from training either way.

For people who never stick with a budgeting app, asking a chatbot "Am I spending more than I make?" is a lower-effort way to look at the numbers. The tradeoff is handing an AI company two years of transaction history. Anthropic's own fine print is worth taking seriously: "Claude can make mistakes in its answers," it says, so ask which transactions are behind a number and check important figures with your bank. It also says the tool "isn't designed to give investment advice."

What's next

Anthropic calls this "a first step" and says it's exploring ways for Claude to work alongside licensed financial professionals, and wants to hear from banks and wealth managers. There's no word yet on availability outside the US or on the free plan.

Sources: Anthropic, The Verge, TechCrunch, Engadget.