Should I use AI for my taxes? Experts say no

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Deborah Kearns

Sat, February 21, 2026 at 7:00 PM GMT+9 5 min read

With tax season underway, millions of Americans are working on meeting the big April 15 deadline. The U.S. tax code is notoriously complex for most laypeople to grasp. Add in the laundry list of changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) signed into law in July, and it gets even more complicated.

To simplify the process, some taxpayers are turning to AI chatbots as a more cost-effective, quick way to get help with their taxes. In fact, nearly half (46%) of Americans say they trust AI for tax advice, while 21% say they’ll use AI to help them actually do their taxes this year, according to the 2026 IPX1031 Tax Procrastinators Report. Those surveyed said they planned to use AI to get answers to filing questions, find deductions or credits and proofread returns for any errors.

While plugging tax questions into an AI helper might seem like a good way to save time and money, experts warn that blindly trusting a chatbot to provide reliable tax advice could backfire spectacularly.

“It is certainly a new paradigm we’re in right now; I would say it’s a user-beware scenario,” said Patrick Runyen, director of advisory at Modera Wealth Management in Wayne, Pennsylvania. “These large-language models are all learning from the inputs, and so you really want to be careful from a pure data-protection standpoint of putting personal information in there in an unsecured way.”

The case against using AI chatbot as a tax guide

You might get ChatGPT or Claude to drum up coherent, sensible answers to pressing tax filing questions. However, as anyone who’s used the tools knows, the outputs are prone to hallucinations and inaccuracies. And the quality of the information is only as good as the prompts used to generate it, experts say.

What’s more, generative AI models use outdated training data that lag current events by months or years. For instance, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o (its latest model) has a training cutoff date of June 2024, while Anthropic’s Claude Opus and Sonnet’s data training is current as of August 2025.

With taxes, there’s also a lot of nuance that generative AI simply doesn’t understand and won’t be able to gauge secondary impacts specific to your situation, Runyen explained. Not to mention, the IRS constantly releases bulletins and updates that may not be included in the tools’ training data.

Accuracy issues aside, the elephant in the room when you use AI for tax help: data security and privacy. Simply put, it’s too risky, said Laura Carruba, an accounting instructor with George Mason University.

“You should never, ever upload any kind of sensitive personal information into a public forum like that, because if you upload your W-2, 1099, or other tax forms…or even if you’re typing it in, it is now public information,” Carruba said.

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Runyen agreed, adding that he doesn’t recommend uploading any tax forms to an AI chatbot — and certainly not without scrubbing them in a PDF editor to remove personally identifiable information. Instead, think of AI as an assistant to get generic guidance, but don’t rely on it for complex tax situations that are better left to professionals, he added.

With a slew of new changes in the OBBB, Carruba said it makes her nervous to think people are relying on ChatGPT to advise them on how to report items like overtime or tip income without any context of how the new provisions in the legislation actually work.

“If you have a significant amount of overtime pay or a significant amount of tip income and you’re trying to figure out how that impacts you, using an AI to get it right could be dangerous,” Carruba warned.

A safer alternative

Existing tax support firms with AI-powered assistants can help consumers cut time and guesswork from the process — without sacrificing their data security.

Also, because the IRS requires third-party preparers who file taxes on their clients’ behalf to get certified on data security and safety, you’ll have significantly more protection using those AI assistants than using an LLM interface, Carruba said.

H&R Block, for instance, has its AI Tax Assist, which offers DIY tax filers on-demand help (at no added cost) with their tax filings. Meanwhile, Intuit TurboTax also has an AI-powered tool, Intuit Assist, within the TurboTax platform that clients can use to get answers to tax questions and troubleshoot the filing process.

These proprietary tools stand out from generic AI chatbots because they’ve been specially trained on the latest tax laws to ensure clients get reliable, accurate answers to their tax questions. This offers taxpayers more peace of mind and confidence in the outputs (and their data being handled properly).

“Our customers can use our service for free, including all the way through tax prep. You don’t pay until the very end,” said Keela Robison, vice president of product management with Intuit TurboTax.

She added that Intuit Assist, for instance, has a cost-basis adjustment feature that saves customers an average of 50 clicks and lowers their taxable income by an average of $12,000.

Bottom line: Be cautious

If you feel compelled to ask your favorite AI chatbot for tax advice, take its answers with a grain of salt. Double- and triple-check the sources it provides and ask it more generic questions instead of offering up personal details that can be connected back to you, experts say.

And don’t forget that as far as the IRS is concerned, you are ultimately responsible for the information you file in your tax return. If an AI chatbot leads you astray, Uncle Sam won’t be too forgiving.

“The alibi can’t be that ChatGPT told me to do it; that’s kind of equivalent to the dog ate my homework,” Runyen said. “If you underpay on a tax liability, there’s likely to be interest and penalties, along with what you owe. Trying to cut corners to save a few dollars may cost you much more down the road.”

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