ChatGPT wants to see your bank account. Nothing unnerving about that at all.

OpenAI would like to know about your mortgage, your debts, your investment portfolio, and that embarrassing number of takeaway orders in March. Starting this week, ChatGPT Pro users in the US can connect accounts across more than 12,000 financial institutions and ask the chatbot questions grounded in their "real financial context." Which is one way to describe handing your bank statements to the company currently fighting a lawsuit in which its CEO has been characterised, under oath, as a liar.

Altman, to be clear, denies that. But it is the backdrop.

The feature is opt-in, in the sense that the data-sharing toggle is auto-enabled and you have to find it yourself to turn it off. OpenAI says your full account numbers won't be visible and the chatbot can't move money. It can only see your balances, transactions, investments, and liabilities. So: everything except the PIN.

There's a partnership with Intuit tucked in here too, for tax help, which is a genuinely useful thing. And 200 million people apparently already ask ChatGPT for budgeting advice monthly, which is either a ringing endorsement or a small civilisational warning sign, depending on your mood.

The pitch is personalisation. The risk is that personalisation requires the data to exist somewhere, and data that exists somewhere can leak.