Should You Connect Your Bank Account to ChatGPT? Think Carefully First

OpenAI announced on Friday that ChatGPT users can now connect all of their financial accounts to the chatbot to receive personal finance advice.

This means you can link your bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial information directly to ChatGPT so it can analyze your spending and give you tips. However, privacy experts are warning people to think carefully before doing this. This feature is available to anyone who uses ChatGPT and chooses to turn it on. If you connect your accounts, you would be giving an AI company access to extremely personal information. This includes how much money you have, where you spend it, what you buy, and your complete financial picture. Privacy experts worry about what happens to this information, who else might see it, and how long it gets stored. Before you connect any financial accounts to ChatGPT, consider these steps:

1. Ask yourself if you really need this feature. You can get financial advice from your bank or a human financial advisor without sharing everything.
2. Read the privacy policy carefully to understand what OpenAI will do with your financial data.
3. Consider that AI companies have been hacked before, and your financial information could be exposed in a data breach.
4. Remember that once you share this information, you cannot control how it might be used to train AI systems or for other purposes. For your financial safety, be very cautious about connecting financial accounts to any app or service. Your bank already offers tools to track spending. Free financial apps exist that work without AI and may have stronger privacy protections. The convenience of AI advice is not worth the risk if it means exposing your complete financial life to a company that might use that data in ways you did not expect.