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- Hacker News
- There is going to be so many horror stories that will come from this, ie. Claude overpaid/underpaid my employees, Claude hallucinated the tax code and now the IRS is seizing my assets. etc…
Murphy’s Law is undefeated. Add in a psycophantic hallucination black box to critical business data and you have a recipe for hilarity.
Normies cannot be trusted to hand off these functions to an LLM because they are mostly incapable of verifying the outputs. Worse yet - these tools are actually idiocratizing the masses to the point they don’t even think they need to.
And of course Anthropic will never have any liability for marketing and selling tools that are unfit for purpose.
- Certified AI Auditor jobs incoming.by noisy_boy
- Aren’t all of these problems solved just by Claude asking the user to confirm that $X should be paid.by tiffanyh
- It's okay, the employee won't be checking their paystubs either. Too complicated. They'll ask Claude to do it for them. "Looks good, bro". Then they go to the bank and apply for a mortgage and guess what, Claude is there too and they get vibe-qualified for a mortgage!
If you thought society was just an imaginary collective delusion before, now it can be collective hallucination too.
by morkalork - I would not trust LLMs with the final word on anything financial.
Not exactly accounting, but ChatGPT (whatever the paid model was in March) told me that paying down principal early would have virtually no effect on interest over the remainder of the loan. It was confused by the fact that it was a short balloon with payments amortized using a 30 year schedule. I did the math by hand to check and told it it was incorrect and it gave me the classic “oh yeah, sorry about that”. It’s the type of thing where for someone that is knowledgeable about the domain, it wouldn’t pass the sniff test. I am not sure if LLMs have a sniff test.
I can’t imagine how hard this will hallucinate when there are layers of accounting, tax codes, etc. But who will notice when it sounds so convinced it is right?
by mahogany - I doubt an LLM is calculating withholding. I presume 99.9% of the actual logic will still execute in QuickBooks or Paychex etc. Lots of this sounds like cross system orchestration against well defined APIs. Yes, there's still danger, it could use the APIs wrong, but humans can use the GUI wrong tooby pwarner
- To be fair we are already having these kind of stories because of human mistakes or lack of competence. The question is like autonomous driving, is the rate going to be higher or lower or same.
- Waiting to hear the stories of things Claude did running amok in Quickbooks.by SoftTalker
- It's a fascinating angle they've taken to give Claude your payroll. I guess we've reached this part of the AI race and they're running ahead of people realizing what it can do.by bontaq
- I’ve given it access to my small business books for the last few months (attended sessions only) and so far it’s helped me clean up countless errors made by humans, at the expense of a small handful of duplicated transactions that got shaken out pretty quickly.by jrickert
- Let me get this straight: a few times per month, someone posts horror stories about how Claude led to losing data and money.
Anthropic's response: let's make a nice package out of this, and let's target specifically the businesses that are less likely to be ready to manage such horrible events.
by trumbitta2 - "someone..." with enough social media weight that is.
It's just like getting Google support.
by dude250711 - Don't forget Microsoft researchers finding that multi-agent, multi-tool workflows result in at least 20% of the original content getting corrupted in the chain: https://www.theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/05/11/microsoft-resea...by sofixa
- The reality is, for a lot of people, they do not care about risk or implication or cost, as so long as they see things moving forward, especially if they do not understand what they are dealing with. The desire of 'build, build, build', to these people does not have a downside because they do not have the knowledge of what the implications of that actually means nor is there a culture associated with the duty of care that should come with the liability associated with other people's data.
Also, small business contracts likely do not have the same type of language around indemnity/SLAs, so it is easier for the harms of this type of system to go unpunished because those who are harmed are even less knowledgeable.
by Ucalegon - > Claude helps take the late-night work off their plates.
This is dangerous. Relying on so much of your business on a third party. We've seen this many times before where businesses get destroyed because something gets broken somewhere that they have outsourced and have no control over.
In my view this service should not be used, unless there is a local llm or clear manual alternative.
Then the question begs - Why use Claude at all?
Maybe a proof of concept only while you come up with a real solution. Maybe to use claude to get rid of Claude
The people who get dazzled by bright lights are going to be the ones licking their wounds later. There is going to be eggs on faces one day.
by tim-projects - Of course, should it be as cost efficient as claimed and if you don't use it but everybody else does, you might be pushed out of the market.by grumbelbart
- > D.3. Limitations of Outputs; Notice to Users. It is Customer’s responsibility to evaluate whether Outputs are appropriate for Customer’s use case, including where human review is appropriate, before using or sharing Outputs. Customer acknowledges, and must notify its Users, that factual assertions in Outputs should not be relied upon without independently checking their accuracy, as they may be false, incomplete, misleading or not reflective of recent events or information. Customer further acknowledges that Outputs may contain content inconsistent with Anthropic’s views.
Must be nice being able to ruthlessly lie with "this is the future" marketing claims, while hiding behind this term of service.
by mhitza - > PayPal powers settlements, invoicing, disputes, and refunds inside Claude.
> Intuit QuickBooks handles payroll planning, the monthly close, and cash-flow, along with tools to help businesses prepare for tax season, and reconciliation work that touches every other system.
I can't wait for the horror stories, this is going to be fun. Remember last month when Anthropic was like: no, we're not going to refund you even though we admit we're in the wrong for anti-competitively burning credits? These are some of the last things I would trust an LLM with in a small business and on top of it Anthropic has shitty customer support. I will actively be telling prospects to avoid.
by windexh8er - > Remember last month when Anthropic was like: no, we're not going to refund you even though we admit we're in the wrong for anti-competitively burning credits?
I'm quite sure at the time that they said they wouldn't give compensation, not that they wouldn't refund them.
by IanCal - These are solved problems that can be extremely efficiently optimized with ML based solutions that require zero LLMs in the loop. This is business compliance on the line so good luck trusting claude on this. Deranged
- I was thinking about this more and more lately. There is really no escaping this , because even if you are sensible in your choices your vendor or service provider may not be. It will introduce a new level of randomness to our interactions that as a society we may not be quite ready for.
From the more obvious possible issues: no payroll, massive refund overpayment, legally binding agreement that puts the business at disadvantage.
FWIW, I like the idea, but I sure as fuck would not let LLM touch real money or pieces that can allow to move it around.
- LLMs are bad at deterministic output.
Full stop.
by julianlam - I suspect that the time spent on accounting or the money spent on accountants will influence decisions made by small-small business owners (1-5 staff range), in that some will take these risks. Admin is a huge pain for very small businesses.by prawn
- For a preview of how this will go, take a look at this:by tmountain
- Closing books and running payroll feel like solved problems with today’s saas and high stakes if you mess up.
This is one of those areas I would spend more time checking the outputs than it would take me to click the button myself.
- I run a small business. I used AI to do book keeping for my LLC with two members (I have a partner). We had used a bookkeeper in previous years but we couldn’t ignore the potential cost savings of using AI. We have a CPA who said the books look great so we will likely no longer need a human to do book keeping. We were able to cancel Quickbooks because of this. Quickbooks (andvanced plan) alone was $3k/year in savings.by riddlemethat
- 3k is like 1/50th of the penalty you're going to get if you make a mistake on your taxes, trust me I know, and Anthropic isn't going to be covering those penalties.
IRS is going to make a ton of money off you naive people. Get a better CPA who's not committing malpractice like your current one.
by dakolli - What is Claude using to keep the books, if not Quickbooks?by SoftTalker
- Then I have good news, you can save even more money by cancelling your Claude plan and using GnuCash for free, without having to worry about the inevitability of having your financials hallucinated.by kibwen
- I run a s business (small if you compare it to tech companies).
I can tell you the drag is between your own tools and the real world (which is very messy and inconsistent): taxes, compliance, payroll, amendments, share structures, etc.
Within my island, my books are in order, invoices and time keeping is fully automated, calendars and sales pipelines are connected.
I'm sure there are many businesses whose inner islands are not as orderly. The zillion tools out there all try to bring equanimity to the chaos and yet here we still are with fresh books, quickbooks, and xero...
by jryio