ChatGPT wants to access your finance accounts, and that’s totally fine

Asking ChatGPT how to save money is one thing. Letting it actually get its tentacles into your accounts and tell you where the damage is happening is another level of trust entirely. For those willing to grant that level of access, OpenAI has announced a new personal finance experience in ChatGPT. It sounds potentially very useful in some respects, provided you’re not already recoiling at the idea of plugging your financial life into an AI chatbot.

In an announcement today, OpenAI said the feature is rolling out in preview to ChatGPT Pro users in the US on web and iOS. You’ll be able to connect financial accounts, see a dashboard of where your money is going, and ask ChatGPT questions based on your own finances rather than getting the usual generic advice that every budgeting app is likely to give.

To be fair, the upsides are obvious. OpenAI’s examples show ChatGPT helping with things like a more tailored savings plan, subscription reviews, travel spending, and working out whether you could afford a lower-paying job. AI can plausibly do this type of analysis well, as it’s ideal for taking a load of messy numbers and spotting a few patterns. It could also spare you from building yet another spreadsheet you’ll abandon by next weekend.

But this is also quite a big ask, as those messy numbers are your financial life. OpenAI says ChatGPT can access balances, transactions, investments, and liabilities when accounts are connected, though it can’t see full account numbers or make changes to your accounts. The company also says you can disconnect accounts at any time, and synced account data will be deleted within 30 days. That all sounds sensible, but there are really two trust leaps here: trusting this much financial data on OpenAI’s servers, and trusting the AI not to do anything unpredictable — something it doesn’t exactly have a strong track record on.

Plenty of people may decide that’s fine. Plenty of others may read that ChatGPT wants to read their transactions and close the tab so hard they sprain a finger.

OpenAI stresses that ChatGPT isn’t a replacement for professional financial advice and that this is only a limited preview for now, with Plus and wider availability planned later. Android users are also left waiting, as the announcement only mentions web and iOS at launch.