Happy Thursday, everybody — today we’re covering Claude’s new bank account analysis feature and what you need to check in your AI privacy settings before you connect anything financial; a $20 million NSF pilot program that could put real money in the hands of small manufacturers and service firms with a proprietary process worth commercializing; a manufacturing tech showcase happening right now in Chicago that’s worth knowing about; a new report on the cybersecurity gap hitting small and mid-sized manufacturers; and a quick Windows 11 update deadline you cannot afford to miss. Let’s get into it.
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Claude Money: AI That Reads Your Bank Account
Let me give Claude and Anthropic their due before we get into the new feature. Back when ChatGPT was eating every headline, Claude was out there quietly doing the same thing — and in a lot of ways doing it better. Better prose, better reasoning, less hype. I used it regularly. Most people hadn’t heard of it.
Then Anthropic did something that changed the whole category. They made agents real. They made coding with AI approachable. They gave the AI the ability to interact with your desktop, reach your files, hold memory across sessions, and actually know what’s going on with a project from one day to the next. That was impressive engineering, not marketing. And now they’re one of the most competitive players in the space.
So when Anthropic announces something new, I pay attention.
The new feature is called Claude Money. The pitch: connect Claude’s AI assistant directly to your business bank accounts so it can analyze spending patterns, cash flow, and overall financial health. If you’re running a business big enough that you’re not personally eyeballing every transaction, that kind of automated pattern recognition could surface things you’d otherwise miss — a recurring charge you forgot about, a cash flow dip that’s developing slowly, a vendor that’s quietly billing more than they should be.
I’ll be honest with you: for my business, I know my bank account well enough that I’m not sure I need this. But I can absolutely see the value for a manufacturer or a service shop with a lot of moving parts and not enough hours in the day to read every line item.
Now, the question you’re already asking: is it safe?
My read is yes, with one important caveat. The AI isn’t going to log in and move your money. You’re granting it read-only, limited access. That part doesn’t concern me much. What does concern me is this: if you’re on a free AI plan, or even a basic paid plan where you haven’t checked your settings, there’s a real chance the AI is training on your data. Including your financial data. Including the patterns of how your business makes and spends money.
Think about what that means. You could be teaching a model — one that your competitors also use — exactly how your operation runs financially. That’s not a theoretical risk. That’s a setting you need to go check right now.
You don’t need me to walk you through the steps. Ask the AI itself. Literally open Claude or ChatGPT and say “how do I turn off training on my data” and it will walk you through it. Do that before you connect anything sensitive.
Claude Money is currently waitlist-only. Head to Claude’s website if you want to get in line. And for what it’s worth, I’ve already connected Claude to my email — both personal and business — and it’s been a real productivity boost. Being able to ask it to surface an email about a project, or draft a reply on my behalf, is the kind of thing that sounds small until you’ve used it for a week.
Honestly? I’d love Claude Money more for my personal banking than my business. I watch the business account daily. My personal account? That’s where the mystery spending lives.
NSF’s $20 Million Deep Tech Pilot: Small Manufacturers, Read This
The National Science Foundation is running a $20 million pilot program aimed at helping small US businesses — specifically service and manufacturing firms — take what they call “deep technologies” and turn them into commercial products.
Alert readers will notice this is federal grant money, which means yes, it came from us originally, and yes, getting any of it back requires paperwork. That’s the deal. But $20 million is real money, and the eligibility criteria are broader than you might think.
The program is looking for businesses that have developed a proprietary process, a specialized tool, or a unique technique — even something your team considers routine — and wants to help you figure out whether it could be commercialized. In other words: is there something you built internally to solve your own problem that other businesses would pay for?
That’s an interesting question to sit with. A lot of small manufacturers have developed workarounds, fixtures, workflows, or quality control processes that are clever and unique. They just never thought of them as products.
If you want to explore it: visit NSF.gov and search for the Deep Tech Commercialization Pilot Program. Review your eligibility. Write down any internal process, tool, or technique your business has developed that you’d consider non-obvious. Then honestly evaluate whether someone else would pay for it.
Could you spend the rest of your life chasing federal grants instead of running your business? Absolutely. I’m not suggesting that. But if you’ve already got something worth commercializing, this is a funded path to do it. Worth twenty minutes of your time to find out.
Manufacturing Tech, Cybersecurity Gaps, and a Chicago Trade Show
Two quick items for the manufacturers in the room.
First: the IMTS trade show is happening right now in Chicago, and Taiwanese tech suppliers are showcasing smart manufacturing equipment. The show runs on a two-year cycle, so this is one of those moments where you get to see what’s actually shipping in manufacturing technology, not just what’s being announced. If you’re close enough to Chicago to make it happen, it’s worth looking into. I wish I’d known about it sooner.
Second, and more practically: a new report is out highlighting a widening cybersecurity gap among small and mid-sized US manufacturers. I’m not going to pretend this is surprising. Security is expensive, the compliance lift is real (especially if you do any defense-adjacent work), and most small shops are running lean.
But here’s the thing about manufacturing specifically: when a machine goes down because of a security incident, you’re not just losing data. You’re losing production time on equipment that cost you real capital to acquire. The cost of downtime on a CNC machine or a production line is not the same as the cost of downtime on an office laptop. The math changes fast.
Baseline security doesn’t have to be a massive investment. Backups, endpoint protection, monitored alerts — you can get the fundamentals in place without a full enterprise IT budget. The report apparently includes some checklists if you can track down the original article in Advanced Manufacturing. Worth finding.
Windows 11 24H2 Loses Security Updates in October
Short, important, no drama: if you’re running Windows 11 version 24H2, Microsoft is ending security updates for that version next month. The fix is straightforward — open Windows Update and run your updates. Get current.
I know updates feel like background noise. They’re not. An unpatched home PC is a door into everything else on your network — your business files if you work from home, your banking, your family’s devices. It’s all connected. The update takes twenty minutes. Do it this week.
That’s the show for today. I’ll be out next Thursday, but I’m going to try to get something recorded ahead of time so you’re not left without your weekly nerd fix. Until then — take care of yourselves, and go run your updates.
— Albert
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