Anthropic has announced a new "Personal Finance" tool for its AI assistant, Claude, focused on analyzing user spending. The new feature moves Claude beyond being a chatbot that only provides general financial advice, positioning it as an assistant capable of tracking budgets and expenses through linked accounts.
The system allows users to connect their bank and credit card accounts to Claude via the Plaid infrastructure. According to Anthropic, this access operates in a "read-only" mode; meaning the tool cannot perform money transfers, manage budgets on behalf of the user, or make investment decisions.
SPENDING WILL BE TRANSLATED INTO PLAIN LANGUAGE
The new tool can answer questions about a user's financial situation based on balances and past transactions in linked accounts. For example, when a user asks, "Where did my money go this month?" Claude can summarize spending in categories such as rent, bills, dining, shopping, and similar.
Claude can also answer follow-up questions such as, "Is this expense higher than normal?" It can provide analysis on topics such as regularly increasing subscription fees, unexpected bank charges, or whether spending has exceeded income.
Anthropic states that the tool does not contain advertisements or sponsored content, and does not market products such as credit cards or loans. For this reason, the company emphasizes that its responses focus on generating explanations and analysis based on the user's data rather than promoting financial products.
Personal finance tools are becoming one of the new areas of competition among AI companies. Following OpenAI's introduction of similar personal finance features for ChatGPT, this move by Anthropic signals that assistants will play a more visible role in daily budget management.
The feature also supports functions such as explaining financial terms and performing calculations based on past transactions. For example, concepts like annual interest rates can be simplified, and items such as the total interest paid by the user in the last year can be calculated.
News Source: 12punto
