Financial information to avoid sharing with AI

As artificial intelligence (AI) tools continue to grow in popularity, many people are using them to help manage their finances. In fact, a recent Experian survey shows nearly half of Americans have or are considering using AI to help them manage their money.

There are many great uses for this, including using AI to help analyze your spending patterns, setting financial goals and much more. However, sharing your financial information with AI also has the potential to pose security risks if you share sensitive information. Learn what financial information to avoid sharing with AI to protect yourself from malicious actors.

What you’ll learn:

• Potential risk of using AI to manage your finances
• Financial information to avoid sharing with AI
• Common scenarios where people overshare with AI
• What to do if you share sensitive information with AI

Potential risk of using AI to manage your finances

While using AI is not inherently risky, not following best AI safety practices (like you would with any other online tool) can open yourself up to significant risk, including fraud, identity theft and more.

To understand the risk, it’s important to understand how online AI tools process and store data, and why this can cause issues when you share sensitive financial information. Even with a reputable AI tool, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, it is necessary to protect private information.

Many AI companies use user inputs to help train and refine their models over time. This means that whatever you share with the model, including sensitive financial information, may be stored for training purposes. This opens your data to risk in the event of a data breach.

Even if you can opt-out of using your data to train the models, AI companies often store user inputs temporarily for safety and legal reasons.

Financial information to avoid sharing with AI

Note: This list is meant to explain common financial information to avoid sharing with AI and is not a comprehensive list.

• Login credentials
  • The username and password you use to log in to various financial platforms should never be shared, as it can easily be used to commit fraud and identity theft if obtained by malicious actors.
• Account and credit card numbers
  • Like login information, account and credit card numbers can be used to commit fraud and identity theft if malicious actors get a hold of them.
• Social Security Number
  • Your SSN is foundational to your identity and having it exposed is a high risk for identity theft.
• Financial documents
  •  Documents such as bank, investment and credit card statements, tax return forms, pay stubs, etc.
• General identifiers
  • Personal information such as your full name, the names of family members, your address, your date of birth, etc.

Common scenarios where people overshare with AI

Sharing financial statements with sensitive info

Many AI tools allow you to upload photos and files, which the AI tool can then analyze. There are many practical uses for this, but it also carries significant risk. For example, you may want to upload an investment statement to an AI tool so it can analyze your portfolio.

The risk with doing this is that financial statements often include sensitive information on them, such as your full name, account numbers, etc., that go beyond the data you want AI to look at. While the AI itself won’t do anything malicious with this information, uploading it introduces a security risk, as this file may now be stored on the AI company’s servers or saved to your account.

Filing taxes

If there’s one financial area where people want extra help, it’s with filing their taxes. Unfortunately, this can be a nightmare when it comes to oversharing sensitive information. Taxes include nearly every sensitive piece of financial information you can imagine—from your Social Security Number to your W2 form and detailed asset details.

Budget assistance

Getting help with your budget is one of the most common financial AI use cases, but it can be easy to cross the line into oversharing info. While general budget conversation is typically safe, uploading bank statements or transaction history can expose you to risk. These documents may include account numbers, card details, merchant info and more.

What to do if you share sensitive information with AI

It can be easy to accidentally overshare with AI. If you find yourself in this situation, there’s no need to panic—here’s several practical steps you can take to reduce your risk going forward.

Delete the chat

If you still have access to the chat log where you shared sensitive information, simply delete the chat. While this may not delete the chat within the AI company’s servers, this still deletes the plain text version in your account. You can also check your privacy settings within the AI tool to opt-out of data retention and model training, if possible.

Change your login information

If you shared login information with AI, change your password on the affected accounts. You should also enable two-factor authentication (2FA) if you haven’t already done so.

Monitor your credit and identity

If you shared sensitive information that could lead to identity theft or fraud, you can begin to monitor your accounts for suspicious activity.

You are entitled to one free credit report from each of the three major credit-reporting bureaus (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion) annually through AnnualCreditReport.com.

AI can be a great tool to help you manage your money, but it doesn’t come without risks. Thankfully, being aware of the sensitive financial information you should avoid sharing with AI can help you use it confidently and safely.