OpenAI has a new feature in preview that asks you to trust ChatGPT with your financial information. Immediate reactions across the internet were largely negative.
The AI company announced the new “personal finance experience” on Twitter and via a blog post. The current iteration is a preview that is only available for ChatGPT Pro subscribers.
What sane individual feels comfortable giving this level of access to OpenAI (or any other company for that matter)Seriously, very curiousMay 15, 2026
Immediate reactions were pretty skeptical.
“Lol. You literally JUST got a class action lawsuit for secretly sharing ChatGPT conversations and user data with Google and Facebook,” is the first comment you can see underneath the announcement.
“What sane individual feels comfortable giving this level of access to OpenAI (or any other company for that matter),” Andrew Zehnder posted.
There are some positive comments, like “ChatGPT going from answering questions to actually understanding your finances is a real shift,” from Shaunak Diwan.
Twitter is known to be full of bots so we need to take the reactions with a grain of salt, but across Reddit the reactions have been largely negative. Surprisingly, the main r/ChatGPT and r/ChatGPTPro subreddits aren’t talking about the announcement.
I found one post with four coments in the ChatGPT sub and all four are negative.
On r/technology one user simply posted, “sounds like malware.”
A majority of comments in the post question why OpenAI made the tool and question the safety of it or accuse the company of wanting to harvest your data. People don’t trust ChatGPT with this kind of information.
“I wouldn’t trust my mom with my bank account, nor my dog chuckles,” one user commented.
But what is this tool and how safe is it?
What is ChatGPT’s “personal finance experience”
According to OpenAI, the tool lets you connect your financial accounts to ChatGPT. You’ll be able to see a dashboard of “where your money is going” and ask the chatbot relevant questions about your “financial context.”
The post claims that more than 200 million already use ChatGPT for budgeting and investments questions. That number seems preposterous but you can find any number of threads on Reddit and elsewhere with people discussing how to use ChatGPT for budgeting.
“ChatGPT can combine that reasoning with your real financial context and what you’ve shared about your goals, lifestyle, and priorities, helping you spot patterns, understand tradeoffs, and plan for big decisions in a way that feels more personal and complete,” OpenAI says.
The tool lets you “securely” link accounts through Plaid, which lets you connect your bank accounts to various apps and services. You may have used it in shopping apps. According to the financial services blog Clark.com, Plaid is fairly safe to use.
Once linked, you’ll be able to share financial context like mortgages, savings goals or major purchase plans.
Is OpenAI protecting your information?
Beyond utilizing the Plaid platform, OpenAI promises that it built the experience to “respect your privacy.”
The company was hit with a class action lawsuit over claims that it shared ChatGPT data with Google and Meta. The company is also embroiled in a lawsuit with controversial former board member Elon Musk who called the company a “safety risk.”
The announcement post says that users are always in control of their information and can disconnect accounts at any time, though it will take 30 days for synced account data to be deleted from OpenAI’s systems. You can also delete financial memories from ChatGPT from the Finances page.
The post also says that if you use temporary chats, the bot won’t access the connected financial accounts or appear in history. It also notes that you can enable multi-factor authentication to prevent unauthorized access.
None of this explains whether the company will use any financial data you put in ChatGPT for model training or selling to third parties. The company also doesn’t say if there are any protections for your info in the event of a data breach.
Tom’s Guide reached out to OpenAI for clarification and will update this story if the company responds.
In the meantime, let us know what you think in the comments.
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