AI can see your bank account now. Would you dare to turn it on?
On November 5, Anthropic added Personal Finance to Claude, initially for paid users in the US. Connect your bank and credit cards, and you can ask it things like, “Where did all my money go this month?” and “How many bills do I still have to pay before payday?”
A few key points:
Read-only. It can’t transfer money or manage investments, and it can’t touch your funds.
It connects to your bank through Plaid, so Claude can’t see your bank password.
It can see your balance, credit limit, and transactions from the past two years.
Honestly, the words “read-only” are key to whether this feature can survive. If it can’t move your money, the worst that can happen is your privacy gets laid bare. But two years of transactions can already tell you a lot about someone: where they live, what time they order takeout, when they get paid each month, who they often send money to—it’s all in there.
One more detail: OpenAI added a similar feature to ChatGPT back in May this year, and now both companies are competing to “help you manage your money.” Anthropic also happens to be heading toward an IPO, so the timing of this financial feature is pretty interesting.
People in crypto should be even more sensitive to this. We’re constantly told never to share our private keys and to grant only precise authorization limits, yet now we’re being asked to hand over our entire bank transaction history to a chatbot.
If it were up to me, using it to check transactions or find duplicate charges would definitely be convenient. But I’d never connect my main card—at most, I’d test the waters with a card for pocket money.
What about you? Would you let AI see your account? Is “read-only” enough to put you at ease?
#AnthropicIPO #AI $ANTHROPIC
On November 5, Anthropic added Personal Finance to Claude, initially for paid users in the US. Connect your bank and credit cards, and you can ask it things like, “Where did all my money go this month?” and “How many bills do I still have to pay before payday?”
A few key points:
Read-only. It can’t transfer money or manage investments, and it can’t touch your funds.
It connects to your bank through Plaid, so Claude can’t see your bank password.
It can see your balance, credit limit, and transactions from the past two years.
Honestly, the words “read-only” are key to whether this feature can survive. If it can’t move your money, the worst that can happen is your privacy gets laid bare. But two years of transactions can already tell you a lot about someone: where they live, what time they order takeout, when they get paid each month, who they often send money to—it’s all in there.
One more detail: OpenAI added a similar feature to ChatGPT back in May this year, and now both companies are competing to “help you manage your money.” Anthropic also happens to be heading toward an IPO, so the timing of this financial feature is pretty interesting.
People in crypto should be even more sensitive to this. We’re constantly told never to share our private keys and to grant only precise authorization limits, yet now we’re being asked to hand over our entire bank transaction history to a chatbot.
If it were up to me, using it to check transactions or find duplicate charges would definitely be convenient. But I’d never connect my main card—at most, I’d test the waters with a card for pocket money.
What about you? Would you let AI see your account? Is “read-only” enough to put you at ease?
#AnthropicIPO #AI $ANTHROPIC