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

Asking ChatGPT how to save money is one thing. Allowing it to reach its tentacles into your accounts and tell you where the damage is occurring is a whole other level of trust. 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 ways, as long as you’re not recoiling from the idea of ​​connecting your financial life to an AI chatbot.

in a advertisement Today, OpenAI said the feature is rolling out in preview to ChatGPT Pro users in the US on the web and iOS. You’ll be able to connect financial accounts, see a dashboard of where your money goes, and ask ChatGPT questions based on your own finances instead of getting the usual generic advice that all budgeting apps are likely to give you.

To be fair, the advantages are obvious. OpenAI examples show that ChatGPT helps with things like a more personalized savings plan, subscription reviews, travel expenses, and determining whether you could afford a lower-paying job. AI may be able to do this type of analysis well, as it is ideal for taking a large number of messy numbers and detecting some patterns. It could also save you from having to create another spreadsheet that you’ll abandon next weekend.

But this is also a pretty important question, since those confusing numbers are your financial life. OpenAI says ChatGPT can access balances, transactions, investments and liabilities when accounts are connected, although it can’t see full account numbers or make changes to your accounts. The company also says that you can disconnect accounts at any time and that data from synced accounts will be deleted within 30 days. That all sounds sensible, but there are actually two leaps of trust here: trusting this amount of 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 of doing.

Many people may decide that that is okay. Many others can read that ChatGPT wants to read your transactions and close the tab so hard that it sprains a finger.

OpenAI emphasizes that ChatGPT is not a substitute for professional financial advice and that this is just a limited preview for now, with Plus and wider availability planned later. Android users also have to wait, as the announcement only mentions web and iOS at launch.