How has AI Tax Advice Taken Over?
These days, when you type a tax question into a search bar or ask a voice assistant (like Alexa), you’re bound to get an AI-generated summary as your answer. These summaries pull from huge swaths of web content and stitch together a single “answer” in natural language.
That’s particularly dangerous when it comes to tax advice. Tax rules are fluid (they’re in constant flux due to changing laws, regulations, IRS guidance, and court cases), and they’re geographically dependent, sometimes down to a specific state or even local jurisdiction. A generic AI summary can easily mash together rules from the wrong year, wrong jurisdiction, or wrong fact pattern and still sound very confident while being wrong for you.
How Often are AI Summaries Wrong?
Independent testers have found that finance-related AI search summaries are wrong or misleading at a disturbingly high rate. One 2025 study found that 37% of Google’s AI Overviews for personal finance queries were misleading or incorrect, with particularly poor performance on taxes, insurance, and student aid.
That level of inaccuracy might be annoying when you’re searching for restaurant reviews, but with taxes, it can mean underpaying, missing elections or deadlines, or taking credits and deductions you’re not entitled to. Even when the AI tax advice isn’t flat‑out wrong, it may skip key exceptions, phase-outs, or “gotchas” that mean the difference between a clean return and an IRS notice or could cost you unnecessary taxes.
Are Specific Help Desk Chatbots Safer?
You’d hope that AI tools run by tax brands or government entities would be more reliable because they’re built on a narrower, vetted knowledge base. In practice, they’re better in some ways—but far from foolproof.
Not long ago, we posted here about problems with TurboTax and H&R Block’s chatbots as well as the City of New York’s own small business chatbot doling out AI tax advice that was, technically, illegal. It’s a sobering reminder that even when the logo is government‑grade, the underlying AI can still hallucinate or oversimplify legal and tax rules.
Almost all of these tools come with fine‑print disclaimers that their answers may be inaccurate and don’t constitute official advice—so they’re explicitly telling you not to rely on them, even as the interface makes them feel authoritative.
The Bottomline
From the IRS’s perspective, you are responsible for what’s on your return. Courts are wrestling with how to treat software-based reliance, and a few cases suggest that good-faith reliance on mainstream tax software may support “reasonable cause” to abate penalties. But those rulings are narrow, heavily fact-specific, and far from a blanket shield for anything an AI tool tells you.
With a live CPA or other qualified tax professional, the responsibility is more clearly shared. The IRS can impose preparer penaltieson professionals who take unreasonable positions or engage in willful or reckless conduct in preparing returns. You may still owe the tax, but you have someone who can help defend the positions taken, negotiate with the IRS, and, in some situations, bear their own separate consequences if their work falls below professional standards.
And one last word on seeking AI tax advice: Be very careful about the data you share online. The prospect of uploading tax returns or financial information anywhere besides a very secure client portal should raise immediate red flags.
Feel free to contact us with questions.
Shutterstock photo | February 19, 2026