Anthropic Wires Claude Into Bank Accounts. It Can Read Two Years of Transactions.

Anthropic’s new Personal Finance beta lets Claude read up to two years of a customer’s bank and card transactions across as many as 16 linked banks and answer questions about spending.

The customer’s daily money question, “where did my money go this month?”, now has an answer outside the bank’s app. The customer grants the access by signing in to the bank through Plaid and approving Claude’s read-only access, so the permission runs through Plaid and Anthropic, not through the bank’s own app.

What does the bank’s customer get?

A single place to ask about every account at once. Claude adds up spending by category, points to charges that hit twice or fees that crept in, and explains a term such as an APR and what it has cost the customer. Claude can also build spending charts and dashboards from those figures on request. Anthropic’s own example sorts a month’s $4,309.37 of spending and warns of four payments due before payday.

The customer chooses which accounts to share, and Claude sees the bank’s name, each account’s name and type, balances and credit limits along with the transactions. Investment, loan and card accounts show balances and limits only, so Claude cannot see a customer’s holdings or loan rates.

What happens when the customer cuts the link?

Claude stops reading the bank, but what it already showed does not disappear. Figures from the accounts stay in the customer’s chats, artifacts and shared links until the customer deletes them, Anthropic’s help pages say.

Anthropic also separates two kinds of conversation. Chats inside the Personal Finance section of Claude are not used to train its models, while chats outside it follow the user’s ordinary privacy settings. The beta is rolling out gradually, and Anthropic did not say how many subscribers can see it yet.

Is Anthropic first?

No. OpenAI previewed personal finance in ChatGPT on May 15, almost six months earlier, also with Plaid connecting the accounts, for Pro users in the US, Plaid said. Plaid says more than 200 million people ask ChatGPT about personal finance every month.

Plaid now supplies the connection for both Labs, and it says nearly two-thirds of the people who link bank accounts to AI assistants through its network had never used a Plaid-powered personal finance app. By Plaid’s account, the assistants are reaching people who had not used a Plaid-powered finance app before.

What does Anthropic want from banks?

Anthropic called Personal Finance “a first step” and said bigger money decisions belong with licensed professionals and regulated firms, with Claude working beside them. It invited banks, wealth managers and other financial services companies to get in touch if they want a hand in building that.

A bank can test its own position with two numbers: how many of its customers have already linked an account to an assistant, and whether the bank can see that.