Robinhood co-founder and chief executive Vlad Tenev in 2025. Image: Pierce Larick / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped
Robinhood, the app that made trading stocks on a phone feel like a game, now wants to let an AI do the trading for you. At its HOOD Summit on Tuesday, the company unveiled Robinhood Agents, AI bots built into its app that can research the market, build a strategy and place trades on their own.
Robinhood says the agents are coming soon to eligible US customers, across all account types.
How it works
You name your agent, pick an AI model to power it (OpenAI’s Luna model is free to use until the end of 2026) and give it its own dedicated agentic account. The agent can “scan the market, review your portfolio, build watchlists, trade, and more,” and it can only touch the money you put in that account.
A follow-up feature called Loops, also “coming soon”, turns a strategy into standing instructions that run around the clock. Robinhood’s examples include checking the market every morning and trading when certain conditions are met, or running an overnight strategy that looks for opportunities while you sleep.
Agents can also plug into paid add-ons Robinhood calls Agent Apps, which feed them outside data. They range from $5 a month for a weather trading tool from Visual Crossing to $30 a month for Unusual Whales’ options trader, with others from Nasdaq, SpotGamma and Quiver Quantitative, which tracks trades by members of Congress. Each comes with a one-month free trial.
Tools “once reserved for hedge funds”
Robinhood is pitching this as the next step in its long campaign to give ordinary investors what professionals have. Chief executive Vlad Tenev put it this way:
Ownership doesn’t work without markets, and markets don’t work without traders.
Vlad Tenev, Robinhood CEO
He said Robinhood is becoming “the best place in the world for active traders by delivering tools once reserved for hedge funds, big banks, and quant firms.”
It isn’t starting from scratch. Robinhood first opened its platform to AI agents in May with a more technical version for people who could connect their own. It says more than 150,000 customers have opened agentic accounts since then, and agents now use its tools about 30 million times a day.
The safeguards, and the small print
By default, you have to approve every trade your agent wants to make, though you can switch that off at any time. In Connecticut, New York and California, crypto trade approvals have to be turned on separately.
Robinhood’s own disclosures are blunt about what can go wrong. Agentic trading carries “significant risk, including the possible loss of your entire investment,” it says, and AI agents “can make errors, misinterpret instructions, act on incomplete or outdated information.” Robinhood says it isn’t responsible for losses caused by your agent’s decisions, and that data you share with a third-party AI provider “leaves Robinhood’s security environment.”
That puts the blame squarely on the customer, much as SpaceXAI’s new Grok terms do for its agents. And agents acting on their own don’t always do what their owners expect: Meta’s Muse recently sold a user’s keyboard and shared his address without telling him.
Why it matters
Most AI agents so far have booked tables or bought things online. Robinhood is handing them people’s savings and the stock market, with approvals that users can switch off. If millions of agents built on the same few models start reacting to the same news at the same time, individual investors won’t be the only ones who need to watch what happens.
Sources: Robinhood newsroom, Robinhood Agents, Agentic Trading on Robinhood
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