Claude Personal Finance vs. ChatGPT Finances: What sets them apart?

Ahead of its plans to go public with a potentially record-breaking valuation, Anthropic recently announced a new feature for Claude called Personal Finance. It's an obvious rival to OpenAI's Finances feature within ChatGPT, which debuted in May. Both options from these AI giants are meant to provide users with a better understanding of their finances and are not designed to offer expert financial advice, but there are slight variations in how they do it that might make you lean towards one or the other. To help you decide which AI chatbot to go with for more clarity on your finances, we've laid out the major similarities and differences of Claude's Personal Finance and ChatGPT's Finances features.

Covering a broad spectrum of personal finance topics, there's a lot of crossover in what both OpenAI and Anthropic's offerings can do. Both of their AI chatbots can address general questions about financial goals, like buying a house, planning an expensive family vacation or creating a savings plan. Claude and ChatGPT will also generate dashboards to offer users better visuals at things like monthly expenses, investments and spending habits.

To activate either Claude's Personal Finance tool or ChatGPT's Finances feature, you have to link your bank account. Both AI companies partnered with Plaid to make this happen, allowing connections with the most popular financial institutions, like Bank of America, Capital One or Chase. Once set up, both Claude and ChatGPT only have "read-only" access to your financial accounts, meaning they can only view the info provided and would not be able to make any changes.

Anthropic specified that Claude's Personal Finance feature can only see your bank name, account name, account type, last four account digits, balances, credit limits and up to two years of transactions. Similarly, OpenAI said that its Finances tool can see balances, transactions, investments and liabilities.

While the core function of Anthropic's Personal Finance and OpenAI's Finances are very similar, the major difference between the two has to do with privacy settings. By default, Anthropic said, "when you chat with Claude in the Personal Finance hub, those conversations aren't used to train our models." Anthropic added that Claude will no longer see any data that you previously provided to its Personal Finance feature if you unlink your bank account.

On the other hand, OpenAI said that "your conversations with connected financial accounts follow the same model training settings you choose across ChatGPT." In this case, you have to opt out of your data being used by navigating to Data controls in ChatGPT's settings and turning off the option called Improve the model for everyone, which is on by default. When you disconnect your bank accounts from OpenAI, the company said that "your synced account data will be deleted from OpenAI's systems within 30 days."

To differentiate itself from OpenAI's alternative, Anthropic said that its Personal Finance feature "has no ads or sponsored recommendations, and it doesn't offer credit cards, loans or savings accounts of its own." While OpenAI doesn't explicitly mention ads with ChatGPT Finances, the company has been testing out ads for its cheaper tiers as of January.

OpenAI said it's looking to bring more features to ChatGPT's Finances by partnering with Intuit to cover more bases like credit card applications or tax questions. As for Anthropic's next steps with Personal Finance, the company wants to hear from banks, wealth managers and financial services companies to help improve the AI tool.