Anthropic has added a feature to Claude called Personal Finance. Users connect their bank and credit card accounts through Plaid and can then ask questions such as "where did my money go this month?" Claude breaks spending into categories like rent and utilities, shopping and dining, and produces an overview. Starting this week, the feature is available as a beta to Pro, Max and Ultra subscribers in the US.
Beyond reviewing past spending, Claude can handle broader questions: which bills are still unpaid before the next paycheck, whether a big expense like a holiday trip is affordable, and roughly how much a user can save each month. If a financial term is unclear, users can ask Claude to explain it.
What it can see, and what it cannot do
The authorization is read-only. Anthropic says Claude cannot transfer money, cannot manage or invest a user's funds, and is not designed to provide investment advice.
Once an account is connected, the information Claude can read includes the bank name, account name and type, the last four digits of the account number, balances and credit limits, and up to two years of transaction history. Two years of records is enough to reveal a person's income rhythm, fixed costs and spending habits, and it carries far more information than a single monthly statement.
Plaid acts as the bridge. A user's online banking password does not pass through Claude, and the bank does not have to deal with an unfamiliar AI program logging in to the account directly. Plaid is an account-linking service widely used in the US fintech industry, and many budgeting and lending apps rely on it to read bank data.
From leak to launch
The feature had surfaced before its release. In mid-September, a media outlet found a module called "Claude Money" in the Claude iOS app, already showing a "Link with Plaid" button; follow-up reports in October said it had been renamed Personal Finance. Less than two months passed between the leak and the beta, and the launch was not limited to iOS in the end.
OpenAI got there earlier. ChatGPT introduced a similar feature in May, also connecting to bank accounts through Plaid. The two companies picked the same connection provider and built similar products: read-only spending analysis and Q&A first, with no handling of funds at all. The difference is in the rollout. Claude is offering this only to paid tiers, and only in the US.
"Personal Finance is a first step. For life's bigger money decisions, we think people are best served by Claude working alongside the licensed professionals and regulated firms they trust."
At the end of its announcement, Anthropic adds that it is exploring how to make this kind of collaboration work inside Claude, and invites banks, wealth managers and financial services companies to take part in designing it. Judging by that wording, Claude does not plan to seek an investment-advisory license itself. It is more likely to bring licensed institutions in, leaving advice and transactions to them.
What remains unclear
Handing two years of transactions to a chatbot raises the question of data handling first. The public materials do not say whether this transaction data is used for model training, how long Anthropic keeps it, or whether records already retrieved are deleted after a user disconnects Plaid. Claude's regular conversations have an existing data policy, but Anthropic has not separately said whether banking data follows the same rules.
Users in China cannot use the feature for now: it is open only to US subscribers, and Plaid's bank coverage is concentrated in North America and Europe. For similar needs, people in China still mainly rely on the spending analysis built into bank apps and the annual spending summaries in payment tools.
Sources: The Verge, TestingCatalog, CocoLoop; checked the subscription tiers and regions where the feature is open, the data fields that can be read, and the length of transaction history.