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As people increasingly rely on AI chatbots for guidance, even on financial matters, a healthy dose of skepticism is critical.

I’ve used ChatGPT to help me build a budget before, and it was genuinely helpful. After I input my monthly salary as well as my standard utilities and recurring expenses, the chatbot drafted a few solid options, and I tweaked them into penny-pinching perfection. I’m admittedly part of the growing number of people turning to chatbots, like Anthropic’s Claude , Google’s Gemini , and OpenAI’s ChatGPT , for financial advice.

“Millions of people turn to ChatGPT with money-related questions, from understanding debt to building budgets and learning financial concepts,” says Niko Felix, an OpenAI spokesperson, when reached for comment. “ChatGPT can be a helpful tool for exploring options, preparing questions, and making financial topics easier to understand, but it is not a substitute for licensed financial professionals.” OpenAI’s Terms of Use state that the AI tool is not meant to replace professional financial advice.

While you may consider chatbots to be practical financial assistants, it's always worth keeping the limitations of these AI tools in mind. Beyond miscalculations, here are five additional reasons to approach them with skepticism when it comes to money tips.

AI Still Confidently Outputs Incorrect Answers

When I ask ChatGPT for help managing my money smarter, the bot is confident in its responses, often laying out what seems like solid reasoning behind each bullet point of advice. But always keep in mind that chatbots can weave convincing errors into outputs.

OpenAI has reduced the rate of hallucination in more recent model releases, but chatbot tools still output errors. “There seems to be this sense emerging, at least among casual users, that the hallucination problem has been fixed,” says Srikanth Jagabathula , a professor of technology, operations, and statistics at NYU. “But that's definitely not the case, because they're fundamentally statistical machines. They don't have a notion of a ground truth, or what is true.”