AI Is Already Doing the World's Taxes. Nobody Checked the Work.

There is a quiet experiment running on the entire population of the planet right now, and nobody designed it on purpose.

Hundreds of millions of people use AI assistants every month. A growing share of them ask it about money — and a growing share of that is tax. "Can I deduct this?" "How much VAT do I charge a client abroad?" "What do I owe if I freelanced and had a job in the same year?" These are questions people used to phone an accountant about. Now they type them into a chat box and act on whatever comes back.

The answers feel authoritative. They're written in clean, confident prose. They cite no source, carry no caveat, and arrive in seconds. And almost none of them were ever checked by a qualified human.

How big is "already"?

Nobody publishes a number for "tax questions answered by AI," because no single company can see across all the tools people use. But you can triangulate it, and the picture is sobering.

The largest AI assistants count their users in the hundreds of millions. A meaningful slice of those people are self-employed, freelancers, landlords, or small business owners — exactly the group that historically struggled to afford an accountant and now has a free one open in another tab. Tax season turns that trickle into a flood.

The result is that AI is, functionally, one of the largest providers of tax guidance on earth. It just happens to be one that nobody licensed, nobody reviewed, and nobody can hold accountable.

Why "confident" and "correct" aren't the same thing

The danger isn't that AI sometimes says "I don't know." It almost never does. The danger is the opposite — it answers everything with the same even tone, whether it's right or catastrophically wrong.

I've watched models do all of these:

• Apply last year's tax bands because that's what dominated their training data.
• Use the wrong personal allowance taper, quietly overstating or understating the bill.
• Invent a deduction that doesn't exist in the user's country.
• Mix up VAT place-of-supply rules, telling someone to charge tax they shouldn't — or skip tax they must.
• Quote a filing deadline that already passed, or one from a different jurisdiction entirely.

None of these come with a warning label. The user can't tell the correct answer from the broken one, because they both look identical: calm, fluent, and sure of themselves.

Who carries the cost

It isn't the AI company. It isn't the model. It's the person who filed.

When the tax authority comes back with a penalty, "the AI told me to" is not a defence anywhere in the world. The liability lands entirely on the individual — often someone who used AI precisely because they couldn't easily reach professional help. We have built a system where the people least equipped to catch the error are the ones exposed to it.

And the damage compounds. Every wrong AI tax answer erodes trust — first in the tool, then in the tax system, and eventually in the profession that was supposed to be the safeguard.

The gap nobody owns

Here's the part that kept me up. There is no one whose job it is to fix this.

The AI companies don't have tax expertise, and tax isn't their core business — it's one of ten thousand topics their model touches. Governments have the authority but not the speed; tax codes change faster than any agency could annotate a model. And individual accountants can't review the open internet one answer at a time.

So the most consequential shift in how the world gets tax advice is happening in a gap that no existing institution is responsible for closing.

That gap is the entire reason OpenAccountants exists. The wave is already here. What's missing is the layer that checks the work — qualified accountants reviewing the rules AI relies on, in the open, with their names attached. That's what we're building, and it's what the profession can step into now.

Nobody checked the work. We're making sure someone does.