Would you let an AI read your bank account?

On 14 September a website that tracks unreleased app features published screenshots of a new section inside Claude’s iPhone app. It is labelled Money, it sits alongside Chats and the other tabs, and its opening screen reads: “Understand your money with Claude. Link your bank accounts and ask Claude about spending, plans, and more.” The press has taken to calling it Claude Money. Anthropic had not commented at the time of writing. It is not in the web version, it is not switched on for ordinary users, and nobody outside the company knows which countries or banks it will support.

That would be a thin story on its own. It is worth a column because of what it follows. In May, OpenAI launched Finances in ChatGPT for Pro subscribers in the United States and extended it to Plus in late June. It lets them connect bank, card and investment accounts through Plaid, a service that links to more than 12,000 financial institutions, and then ask questions like “has my spending changed recently?” and “which subscriptions am I still paying for?” The two largest AI companies in the world are now both heading into your bank account, and the direction is settled even if the details are not.

Nothing here is available to a Jamaican bank account today. That is the point of writing about it now.