Anthropic rolled out a personal finance feature for Claude on Thursday, allowing users in the United States to connect bank accounts and ask the chatbot what they have spent, which bills are coming due, and how much money remains. The launch drew an immediate accusation from crypto investor Anthony Pompliano, who said Anthropic sought inside information from his competing startup, Silvia, months before the rollout.

Read-Only Access to Bank Data

The feature, called Personal Finance, 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, a connectivity service widely used by consumer finance apps, which handles the bank login and supplies Claude with financial data without exposing account passwords.

Once connected, Claude can summarize spending, flag duplicate charges or unexpected fees, explain interest payments, and build charts or bill calendars. In Anthropic's example, a user asks where their money went during the month, then follows up to find out what is left 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 a user approves. According to Anthropic's documentation, conversations inside the Personal Finance hub are not used to train its models, though account balances may lag and AI-generated figures should be checked against bank records. It also remains unclear how Anthropic tracks users' financial data and uses it beyond model training—information that is highly valuable to large data companies. That breadth of access is what separates the release from a routine chatbot update: everyday banking detail now sits inside an AI chat window, which is why the read-only limits and training exclusions do much of the heavy lifting in Anthropic's presentation of the feature.

Pompliano Alleges Anthropic Was Fishing for Secrets

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, ostensibly 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. According to Pompliano, his engineers declined to divulge sensitive information, and someone at Anthropic warned his team about the upcoming launch days in advance.

"Today, Anthropic launched a Claude wrapper that is masquerading as a personal finance product," Pompliano wrote. He further claimed that Silvia's computing costs are roughly 97% lower when using its own models and hardware instead of frontier AI models—a detail the report suggested likely points to a locally finetuned model built for the startup's specific purpose. Whatever the merits of his account, the collision itself maps new competitive terrain: general-purpose AI labs are now shipping the same category of tools that single-purpose startups such as Silvia were built around.

Anthropic was not the first general-purpose chatbot maker to move into personal finance, however. OpenAI launched similar bank connections for ChatGPT in May, likewise using Plaid for read-only access to financial information, and agents such as Hermes, Open Claw, or Grok Bot can also carry out comparable tasks given the appropriate skills, permissions, and instructions.

Anthropic describes Personal Finance as a first step and says it is exploring partnerships with licensed professionals and regulated financial firms. For now, the beta remains restricted to U.S. customers on three paid Claude plans.

This article is based on reporting from Decrypt.