"Where did all my money go this month?" is a question most of us ask, and few of us actually answer. Anthropic thinks its Claude chatbot can help. On Thursday, the company announced Personal Finance, a new tool that lets Claude look at your bank and credit card accounts and explain your spending in plain English.
It works like this. You connect your accounts through Plaid, the same service many finance apps already use. Then you just ask. Claude adds up what you spent across your accounts and sorts it into categories like rent and utilities, food and drink, and shopping. You can follow up with questions like whether that's more than usual. Anthropic says it'll also spot easy-to-miss issues, like duplicate charges, surprise fees, and bills that keep creeping up. It can tell you whether you're spending more than you earn, explain jargon like APR, and work out how much interest you paid over the past year.
Privacy is the obvious worry, and Anthropic tried to get ahead of it. Access is read-only, so Claude can't move, manage, or invest your money. It sees things like the bank's name, account type, the last four digits of your account number, balances, credit limits, and up to two years of transactions. Anthropic says conversations in the Personal Finance hub aren't used to train its models and that there are no ads or sponsored recommendations. It also doesn't offer its own credit cards, loans, or savings accounts, so it isn't trying to sell you anything.
The beta is rolling out this week to Pro, Max, and Ultra subscribers in the U.S.
TechCrunch notes Claude is playing catch-up here. OpenAI added similar personal finance tools to ChatGPT back in May.