Anthropic On Thursday, Claude launched a personal finance feature that allows users to connect their bank accounts and ask the chatbot how much money they have spent, what bills are pending, and how much money is left.
This announcement comes alongside accusations from crypto investor Anthony Pompliano. He stated that Anthropic attempted to obtain internal information from his competing startup, Silvia, several months prior to this launch.
This new feature is named Personal Finance and is currently available in a beta version to subscribers of Claude Pro, Max, and Ultra for users in the United States. Users can connect their bank and credit card accounts through Plaid. Plaid is responsible for bank login, allowing Claude to access financial data without sharing account passwords.
Subsequently, Claude can summarize expenditures, identify duplicate deductions or unexpected fees, explain interest payments, and generate charts or a billing calendar. An example from Anthropic shows that users first ask where their money has been spent this month, and then proceed to inquire about how much is left before the payday.
Anthropic wrote on X: 'The access permission is read-only; Claude cannot transfer, manage, or invest your money.' The company also added: 'Like other features of Claude, Personal Finance does not have any advertisements or sponsored recommendations.'
This assistant can view the balance, credit limit, account name and type, the last four digits of the account number, as well as transaction records for up to 24 months within the user-approved account. According to the document Anthropic, the conversations in Personal Finance will not be used to train its model; however, there may be a delay in reflecting the account balance. The data generated by AI should be verified against bank records.
However, it is not yet fully clear how Anthropic tracks users' financial data and how this data is used beyond model training – and this holds great value for large data companies.
Pompliano accuses Anthropic of spying on confidential information
The Silvia product, part of Pompliano, positions itself as a tool for individual AI chief financial officers. Not long after the release of the announcement on Claude, this person posted a lengthy complaint on X, claiming that Anthropic employees had started contacting Silvia engineers since April, out of interest in the growth potential and computational power needs of this startup company.
“Anthropic has been asking about how we build our products and the details of why they are so popular,” he wrote. Pompliano also described a steak dinner that allegedly involved Anthropic, and claimed that someone told Silvia’s team that CEO Dario Amodei paid for the meal.
He claimed that his engineers refused to disclose sensitive information, and added that someone within Anthropic had reminded his team about the upcoming release a few days ago.
"Today, Anthropic launched a Claude wrapper that masquerades as a personal financial product," wrote Pompliano. He also claimed that when using their own models and hardware, the computing cost of Silvia is approximately 97% lower; whereas using cutting-edge AI models results in higher costs, which likely indicates that they are using local models that may have been fine-tuned for the specific needs of startups.
However, Anthropic is not the first developer of general chatbots to enter the field of personal finance management. OpenAI also launched a similar bank connection feature for ChatGPT in May, which also uses Plaid for read-only access to financial information; and agents such as Hermes, Open Claw, or Grok Bot can also perform similar tasks when they have the appropriate skills, permissions, and instructions.
Anthropic indicates that Personal Finance is just the first step; the company is exploring cooperation with licensed professionals and regulated financial institutions. Currently, this beta version is only available to users in the United States and is limited to three paid Claude plans.
