Anthropic launched a personal finance feature for its Claude chatbot on Thursday, allowing users to connect bank accounts and ask questions about their spending, upcoming bills, and remaining balances. The rollout was accompanied by an accusation from crypto investor Anthony Pompliano, who claims Anthropic sought proprietary information from his competing startup, Silvia, months before the launch.
Feature details and access
Called Personal Finance, the feature is available in beta to U.S. subscribers on Claude's Pro, Max, and Ultra plans. Users link bank and credit card accounts through Plaid, which handles the bank login and provides Claude access to financial data without sharing account passwords.
According to Anthropic, Claude can summarize spending, identify duplicate charges or unexpected fees, explain interest payments, and create charts or bill calendars. The company's example shows a user asking where their money went this month, then following up to see what remains before payday.
"Access is read-only, and Claude can't move, manage, or invest your money," Anthropic wrote on X. "Like the rest of Claude, Personal Finance has no ads or sponsored recommendations," the company added.
The assistant can view balances, credit limits, account names and types, the last four digits of account numbers, and up to 24 months of transactions from accounts users approve. Anthropic's documentation states that conversations within the Personal Finance hub are not used to train its models, but account balances may lag and AI-generated figures should be verified against bank records. How Anthropic tracks and uses users' financial data beyond model training is not completely clear.
Pompliano's allegations
Pompliano, whose Silvia product bills itself as a personal AI chief financial officer, posted a lengthy complaint on X shortly after Claude's announcement. He alleged that Anthropic personnel began approaching Silvia engineers in April, supposedly because they were interested in the startup's growth and computing needs.
"Anthropic was fishing for details on how we built our product and why it was so popular," he wrote. Pompliano also described an alleged steak dinner involving Anthropic representatives, claiming someone told the Silvia team that the meal was on CEO Dario Amodei's tab.
His engineers declined to divulge sensitive information, he claimed, adding that someone at Anthropic warned his team about the upcoming launch days earlier.
"Today, Anthropic launched a Claude wrapper that is masquerading as a personal finance product," Pompliano wrote. He also claimed Silvia's computing costs are roughly 97% lower when using its own models and hardware instead of frontier AI models.
Competitive landscape
Anthropic is not the first general-purpose chatbot maker to move into personal finance. OpenAI launched similar bank connections for ChatGPT in May, also using Plaid for read-only access to financial information. Other agents can perform similar tasks given the proper skills, permissions, and instructions.
Anthropic says Personal Finance is a first step and that it is exploring partnerships with licensed professionals and regulated financial firms. For now, the beta is restricted to U.S. customers on three paid Claude plans.
