Trusting AI with your money is subject to market risks

If you have asked ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude a money question this year, whether about tax on a mutual fund redemption, prepaying a home loan or how an NPS withdrawal works, you are not alone. Millions of people turn to AI chatbots for financial guidance before seeking human advice, simply because it is free, instant and requires no appointment.

The trouble is that, as a new study suggests, the answer you received may have been wrong, and you may have had no way of knowing. After all, there is no free lunch.

Saturn, a UK fintech firm that builds tools for financial advisors, commissioned a study in July 2026. It asked an experienced paraplanner to test 18 widely used AI models against 121 real-world money questions. Each question was asked five times per model, since AI answers can vary between attempts, producing more than 10,000 responses in total.

Every answer was measured against a strict standard: it had to contain every figure, deadline, rule and warning that a qualified adviser would consider essential.

The accuracy gap

The results were striking. The overall accuracy rate across all 17 current models was 43%. That means an AI chatbot's answer to a financial question was wrong or incomplete more often than it was right. On harder, multi-step questions, the failure rate rose to 88%. Even on simple questions, such as those a first-time investor might ask about what a term means or how a product works, accuracy was only 54%.

Free chatbot advice, which many investors turn to, was accurate only 37% of the time, compared with roughly 51% for paid models. The overall average was 43%. If AI is meant to widen access to financial guidance, it is currently doing so unevenly.

What kinds of mistakes do these AI models make? Not vague or philosophical ones. The study's examples show that the errors can affect the very decisions investors rely on AI to help them make.