Robinhood will let your AI agent trade stocks and make (or lose) lots of money

Robinhood is opening its trading platform to AI agents. In an announcement on Wednesday, Robinhood says traders can now create a separate account for an AI agent and add a specific amount of money, allowing the agent to buy and sell stocks across the market.

The company pitches the feature as a way for traders to automate investment decisions, such as having an agent monitor specific industries and make trades, or rebalancing an existing portfolio. But it comes with a big warning from Robinhood:

Though companies like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic view AI agents as the future, the technology isn’t quite living up to the hype of serving as full-fledged personal assistants capable of completing an array of tasks without human intervention. AI agents can be useful for coding, but asking them to buy things on your behalf or fill out online forms often isn’t efficient or accurate.

Robinhood says users will receive push notifications every time their AI agent makes a trade, view a real-time activity feed in its app, and pause AI trades at any time. Users can link AI agents to the platform through the model context protocol (MCP), an open standard that connects AI systems to apps and data. It’s rolling out in beta with support for equities, but Robinhood plans on expanding it to options, cryptocurrency, event contracts, futures, and more.

That’s not the only AI integration Robinhood is launching, as it will also give Robinhood Gold Card customers the ability to connect an AI-powered agent to a virtual credit card. Users will be able to choose how much money the AI agent has access to and tell it what to shop for. From there, the AI agent will search the web for deals and make purchases. As an example, Robinhood says a sneaker fan could tell an AI agent to buy a new release when its price drops below $300, while a pet owner could ask it to purchase a five-star-rated dog toy under $30.

Robinhood says users can opt in to manually approve each credit card purchase, and “when appropriate,” agents will preview trades as well.