The tendency to trust artificial intelligence answers when it comes to financial advice could prove costly for users of popular chatbots, new research suggests. According to his data, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok, and Gemini gave wrong answers to financial queries an average of 57% of the time. If you follow their advice, you may end up losing money.
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Anyway, that’s according to the authors of the Saturn study, called financial times. Furthermore, when it comes to more complex problems involving more than one arithmetic operation, popular AI models have an average error rate of 88%, and in some cases this number even reaches 99%.
The study’s authors asked 18 different popular artificial intelligence models, both free and subscription-based, more than 100 different questions related to money management. The questions were repeated up to five times, and the ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot AI models collectively processed more than 10,000 queries. Representatives of Saturn point out not only banal errors in arithmetic calculations, but also “illusions” in the field of financial rules and law, as well as the lack of proper consideration of upcoming changes in tax legislation. In the tax world, users could lose a lot of money if they rely on incorrect advice from artificial intelligence models, experts say.
For example, the free model Claude Haiku 4.5 created a situation where UK citizens who followed its pension advice faced a £17,500 fine. In another case, the AI model itself “invented” a rule under which college graduates who emigrated abroad allegedly had the right to stop paying their student loans. It is worth noting that the paid artificial intelligence model gave more accurate answers in the financial field, and the new version was more accurate than the previous version. Claude Opus 5 showed the best performance, with 39% errors in inference mode.
As an AJ Bell platform representative pointed out, financial advisors must intervene in the behavior of clients who make reckless trades guided by AI recommendations. However, experts also point out that artificial intelligence does a good job of analyzing user spending and income and making budget optimization recommendations. Polls in the UK show that one in five adults in the country would prefer to let artificial intelligence make major financial decisions related to pensions, borrowing and investing.
Young Brits are also more likely to trust artificial intelligence financial advice than expert blogs and TV shows. Two-thirds of them plan to use artificial intelligence to make relevant decisions in the next year. Unlike the services of in-person financial advisors, the use of artificial intelligence for such purposes will not allow citizens who have suffered losses to claim financial compensation. As the study’s authors point out, this area requires legislative regulation.
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