Robinhood Lets Users Deploy AI Agents for Stock Trades and Card Purchases

Robinhood said Wednesday it will let customers create dedicated accounts where external AI agents can trade stocks and make purchases on a virtual version of the company's Gold credit card. The trading feature, called Agentic Trading, starts with equities in a beta program.

Users preload a balance into the separate account and set limits on what the agent can do. The brokerage will send push notifications for every trade and maintain a real-time activity feed inside the app.

Agents operate only on the virtual card and cannot access primary card details. Users can require approval for every transaction or impose overall spending limits. The company said the design keeps the main account isolated from agent activity.

Abhishek Fatehpuria, Robinhood's vice president of product management, told the Wall Street Journal that customers want to give agents access to Robinhood's tools while keeping safeguards in place.

“One thing that we’ve learned from talking to our customers is that they want to give their agents the power of Robinhood, but in a very safe way.”

Other payment networks have introduced similar capabilities. Visa has built Intelligent Commerce tools that let AI agents transact on behalf of consumers across more than 150 million merchant locations. Mastercard offers its own Agent Pay service, and PayPal has partnered with OpenAI for instant checkout inside ChatGPT.

FINRA reminded broker-dealers in 2024 that existing rules on supervision, recordkeeping, and fair dealing continue to apply when generative AI is used. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has stated that financial institutions risk legal violations and loss of consumer trust when automated systems fail in customer-facing roles.