Anthropic announced Personal Finance on its X account on Thursday 5 November. TechCrunch, ZDNET and Japan’s ITmedia have reported on the company’s blog post, and ZDNET also received details from the company by email.

Users connect their accounts by logging in to their bank through Plaid, a US service that passes banking data to apps. Claude neither asks for nor receives the bank password, ITmedia reported.

Claude totals, categorises and looks for anomalies

Users can ask, for example, where the month’s money went. Claude then adds up spending across the connected accounts and sorts it into categories such as housing, food and shopping, TechCrunch reported.

Anthropic said Claude also looks for duplicate charges, unexpected payments and bills that have gradually crept up. It explains terms such as annual percentage rate (APR) and calculates the interest paid over the year. On request, it can build, for example, a weekly spending chart or a due-date calendar as an editable view (an artifact) that users can return to.

Anthropic told ZDNET that Claude can list the transactions behind every number so that users can check the calculation. The company warned that Claude can make mistakes and advised users to confirm anything important with their bank.

The feature has no ads or sponsored recommendations, and Anthropic does not offer its own credit cards, loans or savings accounts. Personal Finance helps users understand their own finances, but it is not designed to give investment advice, the company said.

What Claude can see

Claude can only read data. It cannot move, manage or invest money. For the selected accounts, it sees the bank’s name, each account’s name and type, the last four digits of the account number, balances and credit limits, and up to two years of transactions. Claude does not see investment holdings or loan interest rates and terms, ITmedia reported. The full account number may still appear in an account name or a transaction description.

Conversations in the Personal Finance hub are not used to train models. Money conversations elsewhere in Claude are subject to the standard privacy settings. Conversations that use account data are not saved to Claude’s memory, and Claude does not draw on them when it searches past conversations, ITmedia reported.

Users can disconnect a bank at any time, including on Plaid’s my.plaid.com page. Deleting a Claude account also disconnects the banks. Earlier answers remain in conversations and shared links, however, so users have to delete the ones they no longer need separately.

OpenAI released a similar feature, ChatGPT Finances, in May. ITmedia reported that it launched as a preview for US Pro subscribers. Anthropic calls Personal Finance a first step and says it is exploring how Claude could work with regulated financial firms.

Personal Finance is rolling out gradually as a beta to Pro, Max and Ultra subscribers in the US. It works on the web, in the desktop app and in the iOS and Android apps. The sources differ on the connection limit: ITmedia said users can connect up to 16 banks, while ZDNET said they can connect as many accounts as they like.