KANE & COMPANY
Strategic Acquisition Brief · Confidential
MaxiFi × OpenAI
Confidential · Prepared for OpenAI leadership

Every model estimates.
Yours could compute — and guarantee.

ChatGPT answers money questions at population scale, and the S-1 makes consumer trust a priced item. On the one domain where a confidently wrong answer does lasting harm, every LLM estimates — CBS put the divergence on the record. MaxiFi is the deterministic engine that computes the provably correct lifetime plan: verifiable, reproducible, trainable into the weights, and — because the math is exact — guaranteeable.

The growth case →Request the briefing
May 7, 2026
CBS MoneyWatch: one household, three frontier engines, three verdicts
145,000+
subscribers to the dated, dollar-specific head-to-head test series
30+ yrs
of economics R&D in an un-scrapeable optimization engine
The Strategic Moment

The correctness layer is not shipped by scale. It is owned — or it is absent.

ChatGPT's personal-finance surface is live, the S-1 is filed, and the roadshow will be asked the hardest consumer question: can people trust the answers? On lifetime money — how much can this household safely spend, claim, convert, and protect — the honest answer for every model, from every lab, is: it estimates. The engine that computes is a single asset, and it is on the market once.


The Claim

Gemini cites. Claude reasons. Perplexity sources. None can substantiate the claim that matters.

A citation tells you where an answer came from — not whether the math is right. MaxiFi solves the lifetime plan for a household's facts and assumptions — every dollar of taxes and Social Security computed under current law, same inputs, same answer, every time, with an audit trail. Provably correct arithmetic; economically grounded advice.

That changes what the claim is. Backed by the pedigree — thirty years of Laurence Kotlikoff's economics, taught with at MIT Sloan by Nobel laureate Robert Merton — and by the reproducible computations themselves, the accuracy claim stops being puffery and becomes a substantiated statement of fact. And determinism unlocks what a claim alone never could: a bounded Accuracy Guarantee with a defined remedy — the play that built TurboTax's franchise, never before available in planning, insurable only because the math is exact.

The moat is enforceable — at the claim layer

The substantiation regime that polices financial advertising — FINRA 2210's fair-and-not-misleading standard, FTC substantiation doctrine — protects this claim. Rivals can run vague accuracy language; what they cannot run is your claim: the specific, falsifiable, guaranteed one. Copying it without the engine is a false claim regulators, NAD panels, and Lanham Act suits will punish.


The Correctness Premium — Top of the Funnel

What the only provable claim is worth at ChatGPT scale.

The equity story

“The assistant whose money answers are computed, guaranteed, and defensible” — a retention and ARPU line the S-1 can carry. Trust, priced.

Subscription attach

Guaranteed-accurate lifetime planning as the paid-tier feature no rival lab can copy — none of them owns an engine that makes a guarantee underwritable.

Train the model, own the ground truth

SCF-perturbed households run through MaxiFi become verified input–output pairs in the weights; the engine remains the verifier that keeps the answers warrantable.

Agent-ready

Operator-class agents call the engine instead of guessing — the money answer becomes an auditable output.

GeminiClaude / PerplexityChatGPT + MaxiFi
The money answerEstimated, citedEstimated, reasonedComputed — and guaranteed
Reproducible?Varies run to runVaries run to runSame inputs, same answer, every time
Can rivals copy it?The words, not the proofThe words, not the proofOne engine exists; imitation is a false claim
Provable in your first quarter of ownership

One quarter of the claim behind the personal-finance surface answers what no forecast can. Owning MaxiFi is the exclusive right to run that play — and to deny it to Google, Anthropic, and Meta permanently. It is a revenue line, not a legal reserve.


The Engine

What MaxiFi is — and why it is categorically different.

MaxiFi (Economic Security Planning, Inc.) uses consumption smoothing and dynamic programming to compute the single, mathematically optimal lifetime plan — solving simultaneously across Social Security strategy, federal and state taxes, Roth-conversion sequencing, withdrawal order, insurance sizing, and upside investing. For a household's facts and assumptions it solves — not guesses: same inputs, same answer, every time, with an audit trail.

A — The architect

Prof. Laurence Kotlikoff — William Fairfield Warren Professor at Boston University; Harvard Ph.D.; former Senior Economist, President's Council of Economic Advisers; named by The Economist among the 25 most influential economists.

B — The validation

Taught with at MIT Sloan by Nobel laureate Robert Merton as an “outstanding science-based lifecycle and retirement management platform” (Merton does not endorse products); featured in Bankrate's “Best financial planning software of 2025” roundup. The economics trace to Nobel-recognized lifecycle work.

C — The moat

Patented algorithms and thirty years of continuously maintained federal/state tax, Social Security, and benefit rules with a validation record — exactly the IP a language model cannot reverse-engineer and a build team cannot shortcut.

D — Founder continuity

Larry Kotlikoff intends to stay on with the acquirer — to integrate the engine, validate the training and guarantee programs, and continue as spokesperson. The acquirer buys the engine and keeps the economist who built it.


The Integration

Train the model, don't bolt on a layer — and keep the verifier.

The method is public: perturb the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances into billions of synthetic households, run each through MaxiFi's engine, train on the verified pairs — the economics lives in the weights, and the engine remains the runtime verifier that makes every answer warrantable. Owning the engine and its founder is the train-the-model path: Kotlikoff stays on to integrate and as spokesperson.


The Floor Under the Claim

And the defense comes with the deal.

Courts and regulators are converging on AI-answer accountability — a European court has held AI answers to be the platform's own speech, and the first GenAI exam cycle reaches embedded tools. MaxiFi converts the scaled money answer from a liability into an exhibit: computed, verifiable, reproducible.

And the engine ships with the architecture that keeps the floor solid under an advertised claim: assumptions and law-table version disclosed on every output, customer input attestation, versioned rule tables with re-run notices on law changes, and the Accuracy Guarantee's defined remedy. The audit trail proves each customer was told exactly what was — and wasn't — promised.

We price the asset on the growth case above. The defense beneath it is a term of the deal, not the deal — and, like the claim itself, it is denied to every competitor the day it is yours.


The Published Proof Line

Dated, dollar-specific, reproducible — and public.

May 13, 2026 · the retirement smile

A frontier model's retirement “smile” ran 13% too low in each of a real household's 40 remaining years against MaxiFi's computed path — dated, dollar-specific, reproducible.

July 2, 2026 · “Want to Get Life Insurance Wrong? Ask AI”

Four frontier AIs sized the same father's coverage at $1.3M, $1.4M, and $3.8M — against MaxiFi's internally consistent $2.09M. Every shortcut the AIs used is programmable — and wrong.

May 7, 2026 · CBS MoneyWatch

One retirement question, three frontier engines, three different verdicts — with MIT's Andrew Lo noting these tools carry no best-interest duty. The category estimates; the divergence is the proof.

The megaphone

The tests publish to 145,000+ subscribers and counting — credibility no rival in the category can match, and it conveys with the acquisition.


Why OpenAI — Now

Five reasons, in order.

Why it is still available, and why you

Larry built this over thirty years for the households now asking ChatGPT what to do with their money. We are running a deliberately narrow process for the home where the correct answer reaches the most real people. That is why this conversation — and why it started with you.

The next step: a 30-minute briefing — MaxiFi solves a real household's lifetime plan, live, while a frontier model is asked to match it. The gap is the thesis; the funnel is the price.

Michael Kane, Ph.D., J.D. · Managing Partner, Kane & Company · FINRA / SEC / SIPC–Registered Investment Bank
Commerce@kaneco.com · 310-441-5263 · Representing Economic Security Planning, Inc.