AI Agents Instead of Traders: Robinhood Launches Beta Starting with Stocks
In recent hours, Robinhood has opened its platform to artificial intelligence agents, introducing Agentic Trading and Agentic Credit Card: two products that allow an AI agent to operate in the markets and spend with a credit card on behalf of the customer.
The company led by Vlad Tenev has been developing AI tools for some time: it acquired the research platform Pluto in 2024, and in March 2025 it launched Cortex, the assistant that provides analysis and suggestions to subscribers of the Gold plan. This announcement also comes just weeks after OpenAI released a personal finance tool that connects an agent to the user's accounts. The broker from Menlo Park addresses a base of over 27 million customers with funded accounts.
How Agentic Trading Works
The mechanism relies on a dedicated account, separate from the rest of the portfolio. The user deposits a sum, and the agent can only operate within that perimeter, without touching other positions. The connection occurs through Robinhood's MCP servers, which the company describes as AI-native: it links to an agent built on third-party platforms, such as those based on Claude or ChatGPT, without resorting to unofficial APIs.
The agent can read and analyze the portfolio, define strategies based on the user’s indicated goals, and execute orders. The company cites three use cases: analysis of concentration risk followed by rebalancing, construction and monitoring of a thematic portfolio, and backtesting of a mean-reverting strategy that is then automated. In this beta phase, only stocks are allowed; support for options, cryptocurrencies, event contracts, and futures is announced for the following weeks, upon exiting beta.
On the control front, the user receives a notification for every transaction, has access to a real-time activity flow with profit and loss trends, and can disconnect the agent at any time. When appropriate, the agent shows a preview of the order before execution, making the details visible before it is processed.
However, the legal notes are explicit about the limits of this autonomy. Robinhood states that it does not control, supervise, monitor, recommend, nor verify connected agents. Once shared with the AI provider chosen by the user, the account data leave the company’s secure environment and fall under the terms of that provider. The customer assumes all risks for orders executed by the agent, including the potential loss of the entire invested capital, and remains responsible for monitoring the account activity.
The Credit Card for Agents
The second product extends the same “agentic” concept to spending. During setup, the user links the agent to a virtual card associated with the Robinhood Gold Card, sets a spending limit, and decides whether to require manual approval for each purchase. By default, the agent accesses only that virtual card, without the main card number or any other account information, and the card can be deleted at any time. The linking is done through the MCP server of the banking division.
In regular operation, the agent can compare prices, monitor product availability, and make purchases following the received instructions, with 3% cashback. The card is available for Gold Card holders; support for the Robinhood Platinum Card will come with the launch of the latter, expected by the end of the year.
The product is part of a broader trend. Payments managed by AI agents are a direction that card networks are also moving towards: we have already written about Visa, whose Intelligent Commerce system is expected in Italy during 2026.
Tenev presented the initiative as an extension of the company's stated mission to democratize finance, now also aimed at agents. However, the same legal notes specify that that supervision does not fall to Robinhood and that the risk entirely lies with the customer. The complete API documentation for Agentic Trading and Agentic Card is already published on the company’s website.