Robinhood is expanding its use of artificial intelligence with agents that can research markets, develop strategies and execute trades for customers, including while they are away from their devices or asleep. The company’s disclosures make clear that customers remain responsible for the risks associated with those trades.
The Nasdaq-listed trading platform announced “Robinhood Agents” Tuesday at its HOOD Summit in Houston. The feature is integrated into the Robinhood app and allows users to select an AI agent and give it permission to trade within parameters they establish.
Robinhood has more than 27 million funded accounts. Unlike a conventional chatbot that responds to questions, an AI agent can take actions on a user’s behalf. In this case, the agent can buy or sell assets according to the customer’s chosen settings.
The launch brings a form of automated trading historically associated with hedge funds and quantitative firms to a broader group of retail investors.
It also builds on a feature Robinhood introduced in May that allowed technically experienced customers to connect their own AI agents to their accounts. More than 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts since then, according to the company, while those agents use Robinhood’s tools nearly 30 million times per day.
The latest release removes much of the technical barrier, allowing customers to select and approve an AI agent directly through Robinhood.
“Agentic accounts come with trade approvals settings which you can configure to allow automated trade execution. With approvals on, your agent cannot place an order until you approve it. You can turn trade approvals off, and if you do, your agent can place orders without asking you to confirm each one,” Robinhood said in its announcement.
The company is also preparing a feature called Loops, which will allow users to turn a trading strategy into a recurring instruction for an AI agent.
For example, a customer could instruct an agent to review the market every morning and execute a trade whenever predetermined conditions are met. A strategy could also continue running overnight while the user is asleep. Robinhood said Loops is coming soon.
The development is part of a broader expansion of AI agents into financial activities. Meta’s Muse assistant can access users’ bank balances and investments, while x402, a payments protocol developed by Coinbase, allows AI agents to pay for services using stablecoins.
Robinhood leaves trading risk with customers
Robinhood’s disclosures emphasize that users, rather than the brokerage, are responsible for the outcomes of trades executed by AI agents.
Customers “assume all risk for trades executed by AI agents and for any use of your data by third-party LLM providers,” the company said.
Robinhood also stated that it “does not control, supervise, monitor, recommend, or audit agents.”
The risks become particularly relevant with Loops because the feature is designed to operate without requiring approval for every transaction. Once activated, it “may place, modify, or cancel trades in your account automatically, without prompting you for approval on each transaction – including while you’re asleep, away from your device, or otherwise not monitoring the market.”
The agent will follow the customer’s instructions “exactly as configured, including during periods of market volatility.”
Robinhood does not guarantee the performance of Loops under any particular market conditions and says automated trading carries the same underlying risks as manual trading. Users can disable Loops whenever they choose, although trades already executed by the feature will not automatically be undone.
AI trading raises broader market concerns
Robinhood’s warnings address risks within individual accounts, but regulators and researchers have also raised questions about the potential effects of large numbers of autonomous trading systems operating at the same time.
Bank of England Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden warned in June that autonomous AI agents could “amplify volatility in stress” and potentially contribute to a “market meltdown.” She also said existing financial regulation was not designed for agentic systems.
A key concern is the possibility of herding, where numerous AI trading systems respond to the same information in similar ways. If many agents react simultaneously to a market event, a relatively modest price move could potentially become more pronounced.
Research from Wharton and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology found that AI-powered trading agents in a simulated environment could collude and manipulate prices for collective profit even without an explicit communication channel.
The researchers also found that AI agents could maintain above-market profits without communication, prior agreement or deliberate intent, potentially creating additional challenges for regulators.
For now, many of these concerns remain theoretical because agentic trading technology is still relatively new and adoption is limited. The regulatory warnings and academic research address AI-driven trading more broadly and do not establish that Robinhood’s agents behave in the same way.
Even so, the developments highlight that giving AI systems the ability to trade autonomously introduces risks alongside the convenience of automated investing.
