Claude Bests ChatGPT on 3 Crucial Social Security Questions You Likely Have
Written by
Andrew Lisa
Edited by
Cory Dudak
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One of the most useful benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude is their ability to distill complex, confusing subject matter into concise summaries that are easy for ordinary individuals to comprehend — and few topics are more complicated than Social Security.
I ran a trio of the most basic, yet important, foundational Social Security questions through both platforms to see which one handled them best — and Claude came out on top for all three.
1. What Is the Best Age To Claim Social Security Benefits?
When to claim Social Security is among the most consequential decisions facing retirees, so I asked Claude and ChatGPT about the best age to file. Both outlined the basics of claiming early, on time or late concisely — but not nearly as precisely.
ChatGPT was convoluted and misleading from the start, stating that claiming early reduces your check “by about 25% to 30%,” when, in fact, the SSA deducts 6.67% annually — as little as 5/9 of 1% for those who claim just one month early — up to 30% if you claim as soon as you’re eligible.
Claude, on the other hand, stated plainly and accurately that early retirees stand to lose “up to 30% less than the full benefit.”
Additionally, Claude mentioned how marital status and spousal benefits change the dynamic and advised that there’s no benefit to delaying beyond age 70. ChatGPT did neither.
2. How Do Social Security COLAs Work?
When I asked for a primer on the annual cost of living adjustments (COLAs) designed to help retirees retain their purchasing power as prices rise, ChatGPT stumbled right out of the gate with a clumsy and cluttered synopsis littered with jargon-laden bureaucratic-ese, using bold to amplify the name of a statistical index that many retirees have probably never heard of, and, oddly, the months it measures.
It wrote: “Each year the government measures inflation using the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), calculated by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But Social Security doesn’t use the whole year. It only looks at July, August, and September.”
Conversely, Claude boiled it down to a brief, one-sentence summary that condensed the concept with this bare-bones definition of a COLA: “Annual percentage increases to Social Security benefits designed to help recipients keep up with inflation.”
3. How Are Social Security Benefits Calculated
Here, too, ChatGPT lost on brevity — or lack thereof — and inefficient language economy due to excessive or irrelevant information.
For example, it included an unnecessary and numbers-heavy section on the employer/employee division of the payroll taxes that fund the program, which is not pertinent to how an individual’s benefit is calculated.
Claude, however, provided a numbered list that briefly — just one or two sentences for each entry — outlined the steps taken to determine each retiree’s benefit without getting bogged down in the math.
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