Anthropic Lets Claude Read Users' Bank Accounts in New Personal Finance Beta

The feature launched on Thursday for the Pro, Max and Ultra plans. It is not available on the Free, Team or Enterprise tiers. Anthropic said in its announcement that access is read-only, and that Personal Finance "can't move, manage, or invest your money." The company also said the tool is not designed to give investment advice.

The launch takes Anthropic, whose products are best known to developers and businesses, into consumer finance, where OpenAI is already active. OpenAI added a similar feature to ChatGPT in May, which also connects accounts through Plaid. Anthropic has also tested a version of the product under the name Claude Money in its iOS app.

Accounts are connected through Plaid, the financial data network, and users sign in to their bank inside Plaid's interface. Anthropic said Claude never receives the user's bank password. For each linked account, Claude can see the bank name, the account name and type, the last four digits of the account number, balances, credit limits and up to two years of transactions. Anthropic's help documentation says each transaction record includes the amount, date, merchant, category and the bank's description.

The access has limits. For investment accounts, loans and cards, Claude reads only balances and credit limits, not holdings, trades, interest rates or terms. Only US banks can be linked.

In its announcement, Anthropic gave examples of how the feature works. A user asks where the month's money went, and Claude totals spending across linked accounts and breaks it into categories such as rent and utilities, food and drink, and shopping. Claude can also flag duplicate charges, unexpected fees and bills that have risen over time. It can explain terms such as APR and calculate how much interest a user has paid. Users can ask it to build charts, payment due-date calendars and dashboards that they can keep editing.

On privacy, Anthropic said conversations inside the Personal Finance hub are not used to train its models. Chats about money held outside the hub follow each user's existing privacy settings. The help documentation says Claude will not save anything to memory from a chat that has used linked account data. Financial data stays in chat history until the user deletes the chat, and deleting an account automatically unlinks the user's banks. Users can unlink a bank at any time, either in Claude or through Plaid's own portal.

Anthropic also said the product carries no ads or sponsored recommendations, and that it does not offer its own credit cards, loans or savings accounts. Its announcement warned that Claude can make mistakes and advised users to check important figures with their bank. The help documentation adds that balances can lag by a day or two.

Personal Finance works on the web, the desktop app, and the iOS and Android apps. Linked account data cannot be used in scheduled tasks, Cowork tasks or Claude Code.

Anthropic described the beta as a first step. It said it is exploring how Claude could work alongside licensed professionals and regulated firms, and it invited banks, wealth managers and other financial services companies to help shape that work. The company has not said when the feature might reach users outside the United States.