Anthropic launched the Claude personal finance feature, and Pompliano accused it of stealing startup information

Anthropic launched the personal finance feature Personal Finance for Claude on Thursday, available in beta form for paid subscribers of Claude Pro, Max, and Ultra in the United States. Users can link their bank and credit card accounts through Plaid, which handles the login process, allowing Claude to access financial data without account passwords. This feature can summarize expenses, identify duplicate charges or unusual fees, explain interest expenditures, and generate charts or billing calendars. Anthropic stated that access is read-only, and Claude cannot transfer, manage, or invest user funds; Personal Finance does not include ads or sponsored recommendations.

Cryptocurrency investor Anthony Pompliano raised allegations after the feature's release. His product Silvia is positioned as a personal AI Chief Financial Officer, and he claimed that Anthropic employees have been in contact with Silvia engineers since April, ostensibly to understand the company's growth and computing power needs, but in reality to probe into the product's construction and reasons for its popularity. He also described a steak dinner allegedly attended by representatives of Anthropic, claiming someone informed the Silvia team that the meal was paid for by CEO Dario Amodei. Pompliano stated that his engineers refused to disclose sensitive information and claimed that someone at Anthropic warned his team several days in advance about the upcoming product release, noting that Silvia's use of its own models and hardware incurs computing costs approximately 97% lower than cutting-edge AI models.

Anthropic is not the first general chatbot company to enter the personal finance space. OpenAI launched a similar bank account linking feature for ChatGPT in May, also providing read-only access through Plaid. Anthropic stated that Personal Finance is just the first step and is exploring collaborations with licensed professionals and regulated financial institutions; currently, this beta version is limited to users of the three paid Claude subscription plans in the United States.