Cole Kan/CNET/Getty. Filing taxes is painful enough that many people would happily hand the job to a robot. In the age of generative AI, where chatbots can crank out a decent-sounding school essay in under a minute, it’s tempting to think your tax return could be next.. There’s just one small problem. The Internal Revenue Service expects financial data to be accurate, not just “close enough.”. I asked some tax experts whether you should have a general-purpose AI chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity do your taxes for you. The answer was clear.. “I don’t recommend that at all,” said Travis Thompson, a tax attorney and director in the business and finance group at the firm Fennemore.. “My advice would be no,” said Sterling Raskie, senior lecturer of finance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.. Tax season makes everyone look for shortcuts. Federal income tax returns are nightmarish and complicated — and that’s exactly what makes them unsuited for a chatbot. AI is very good at sounding right even when it’s wrong.. Still, if you can’t afford to hire a trusted, trained human to help with your taxes, there are some things generative AI can be useful for during tax season.. You can’t trust AI to be accurate. The capabilities of a generative AI model are impressive. But let’s remember that, at their core, these educated-guess machines are simply finding patterns and offering plausible results. They can’t distinguish approximation from the truth.. The numbers on your tax forms are expected to be correct, not simply ballpark. That’s why doing your taxes is such a pain, and also why we’re not supposed to take shortcuts. Mistakes can be costly to your refund, or you could face expensive repayments and fines, or worse.. “It’s important to keep in mind that if an AI chatbot provides incorrect guidance and a person uses it to file an incorrect tax return, they (the person) are responsible for infractions or violations, which could include penalties, interest, and lost refunds,” said Chris Linderwell, vice president of consumer tax products at H&R Block.. Some tax-specific AI tools are trained on and rely specifically on information about the tax code. But the generic one you use for menu planning or travel research is not one of those.. Read more: Tax Season 2026: Which Documents and Info Do You Need to File Income Taxes?. You can’t trust AI with sensitive documents. Highly personal information, such as your Social Security number and financial statements, should be kept safe — or at least as safe as possible in today’s digital world, where data collection through email and social media is ubiquitous, and data breaches are common.. Chatbots manage data in the cloud, which is just a computer owned by a private company. They have “memory” features that can regurgitate information in unexpected ways. You may find yourself asking a totally unrelated question down the line and get a response that pulls from data in your tax documents. You p
