Robinhood opens AI agents to stock trades and card spending

Robinhood on Tuesday said customers will be able to connect AI agents to a separate trading account that can place stock orders on their behalf, alongside a new credit card that pays 3 per cent cash back on purchases an agent makes. The launch puts agentic AI inside live retail-finance products rather than the chat or search tools consumers have grown used to.

At launch, Agentic Trading is in beta and limited to equities. Robinhood said the tool uses a dedicated funded account instead of a direct link to a customer’s main portfolio. Users can approve actions manually, disconnect an agent and keep 24/7 oversight, the company said.

Those guardrails are the pitch. For Robinhood, they are also the sales line for customers wary of autonomous trades.

They also give the broker a narrower place to start as it tests whether retail customers will hand routine decisions to outside software inside a regulated app.

In the company’s announcement, chief executive Vlad Tenev said: “Our mission has always been to democratize finance for all, and now, that mission extends to AI agents.”

Robinhood said the system is open to third-party agents rather than a single in-house assistant. The company is betting that customers will want to bring their preferred models into the workflow instead of relying on one brokerage-built bot.

The trading account is only part of the rollout. Robinhood’s Agentic Credit Card extends the same idea into spending, so a customer’s agent could act across brokerage and payments once authorised. That makes the launch broader than recent finance AI tools centred on chat, summaries or customer-service support.

Money movement also makes the risks harder to ignore. Robinhood said in the same announcement that “AI agents can make errors, misinterpret instructions, act on incomplete or outdated information, and may behave in unexpected ways”. It also said data shared with third-party AI providers sits outside Robinhood’s security environment. For customers, the questions are simple: does the agent take the right action, and what happens to sensitive financial data once it leaves the broker’s own systems?

For now, the beta starts with stocks, though Robinhood said it plans to add options, crypto, event contracts and futures later. Keeping the first release to listed equities gives the company a simpler test case before it moves into faster or more speculative markets. It also lets Robinhood argue that this is a staged product rollout, not a wholesale handover of portfolio control.

Semafor’s account said the tools could help ordinary customers compete more closely with institutions that already use automated execution systems. Robinhood is not offering hedge-fund infrastructure, but it is packaging the same basic idea for retail users: software can watch markets and act faster than someone tapping through orders on a phone.

The launch lands in a wider race to turn AI agents into transaction tools. Reuters said fintechs are treating payments and brokerage tasks as the next front in agentic commerce, while GeekWire reported that Amazon is offering its AI shopping technology to outside retailers.

Large platforms no longer want AI to stop at search or drafting. They want it to finish the task, which puts permissioning, liability and audit trails closer to the centre of the product.

Robinhood is moving early, but with blunt disclosures and a tightly constrained first release. If customers accept those guardrails, the company could gain an advantage before rivals and regulators settle on a common approach to delegated trading and spending. If they do not, the beta will still show how much autonomy retail users will tolerate when an AI agent can touch both a stock order and a card purchase.