Would you let an AI read your bank account?

On 14 September a website that tracks unreleased app features published screenshots of a new section inside Claude’s iPhone app. It is labelled Money, it sits alongside Chats and the other tabs, and its opening screen reads: “Understand your money with Claude. Link your bank accounts and ask Claude about spending, plans, and more.” The press has taken to calling it Claude Money.

Anthropic had not commented at the time of writing. It is not in the web version, it is not switched on for ordinary users, and nobody outside the company knows which countries or banks it will support. That would be a thin story on its own.

It is worth a column because of what it follows. In May, OpenAI launched Finances in ChatGPT for Pro subscribers in the United States and extended it to Plus in late June. It lets them connect bank, card and investment accounts through Plaid, a service that links to more than 12,000 financial institutions, and then ask questions like “has my spending changed recently?” and “which subscriptions am I still paying for?” The two largest AI companies in the world are now both heading into your bank account, and the direction is settled even if the details are not.

Nothing here is available to a Jamaican bank account today. That is the point of writing about it now. It reads transactions, categorises spending, tracks balances and subscriptions and answersquestions in plain language.

It does not move money, pay bills, make trades, change account settings orreplace your adviser. (Branded graphic by PGH Consulting, LLC) What the feature actually does, and does not The best guide to what Claude Money will look like is the version that already exists, because OpenAI has published its rules in full. It categorises transactions, tracks spending patterns and subscriptions, monitors balances and net worth, reviews an investment portfolio and explains what drives a credit score.

It then answers questions about all of that in plain language, which is the part people find useful: not a dashboard, but a conversation about the dashboard. OpenAI’s help page lists what the feature cannot do, and the list is long by design: it cannot move money, pay bills, change account settings, make trades, change retirement contributions, open or close accounts, file taxes, or act as your financial, legal, tax or investment adviser.