Anthropic unveiled a new feature called "Personal Finance" for Claude on Thursday, aimed at helping users monitor their money. Through Plaid, users can link their bank and credit card accounts and then pose questions to Claude about their finances. According to Anthropic, access is read-only—Personal Finance cannot move, manage, or invest users' funds. By connecting Claude directly to bank and credit card accounts, Anthropic is casting its chatbot as a financial sidekick that helps people understand their spending and make sense of their money, rather than just dispensing generic advice. With this launch, Claude is trailing OpenAI's ChatGPT, which rolled out similar personal finance tools in May that likewise let users link financial accounts and ask questions ranging from spending patterns to long-term financial planning. "Claude gives you answers in everyday language, from your balances and transactions, and explains any term that's new to you," Anthropic wrote in a blog post. "Like the rest of Claude, Personal Finance has no ads or sponsored recommendations, and it doesn't offer credit cards, loans, or savings accounts of its own, so your money questions get a straight answer."

For example, at month's end a user could ask Claude, "Where did my money go this month." The chatbot would then total spending across the connected accounts and categorize it—rent and utilities, food and drink, shopping, and so on. Users can dig deeper with follow-up questions like, "Is that more than usual." or "Anything else I'm missing."

Anthropic says the tool does more than basic spending summaries: it analyzes transactions across linked accounts to flag potential problems such as duplicate charges, unexpected fees, and steadily rising bills. Users can also ask broader questions about their finances, such as whether they're spending more than they earn. The tool can explain financial concepts like APR (annual percentage rate) and provide calculations showing how much users have paid in interest over the past year. Naturally, some people will hesitate to link their financial accounts to an AI chatbot. Anthropic says Claude's access is confined to each connected bank's name, account name and type, the last four digits of the account number, balances, credit limits, and up to two years of transaction history. The company also notes that conversations users have with Claude in the Personal Finance hub aren't used to train its models. Personal Finance begins rolling out in beta this week to users on the Pro, Max, and Ultra plans in the U.S. The new tool's launch comes as Anthropic has been pushing Claude into new verticals—earlier this year, for instance, it launched Claude for Legal and Claude for Financial Services.