- Robinhood is bringing AI-powered automated trading to its app, letting customers build strategies and place trades on their behalf.
- The platform is also adding crypto perpetual futures, with up to 10x leverage on bitcoin and ether.
- Both products target active traders but are still rolling out to eligible U.S. customers.
Nasdaq-listed Robinhood HOOD$113.20· is launching an AI tool that can trade on customers’ behalf, even when they’re away. But it’s not without risks, according to Robinhood’s own disclosures.
The online trading platform, which has more than 27 million funded accounts, announced Robinhood Agents on Tuesday at its HOOD Summit in Houston. The tool is built into the Robinhood app. It can research markets, build strategies and place trades for a customer at any hour.
AI agents are different from chatbots. A chatbot answers questions. An agent takes action, in this case buying and selling on a customer's behalf within limits the customer sets.
In other words, Robinhood is bringing automated trading, long the domain of hedge funds and quant firms, to everyday investors.
It's a big step up from Robinhood's May launch, which let tech-savvy users connect their own AI agents to their accounts. More than 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts since, and these agents now tap Robinhood's tools almost 30 million times a day, according to the company.
Now anyone can do it by selecting and approving an AI agent.
“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,” the announcement said.
Next up is a feature called Loops. It turns a strategy into a standing instruction that the agent carries out on repeat, day and night. For example, an agent could check the market every morning and trade when certain conditions are met, or run a strategy overnight while the customer sleeps. Robinhood says Loops is coming soon.
The announcement fits a broader industry trend of AI agents that move money, pay bills and place trades on a user's behalf. Meta's Muse assistant can already see users' bank balances and investments, and x402, a payments protocol developed by Coinbase, lets agents pay for services in stablecoins.
User carries the risk
Robinhood’s AI agents are not without risks and the announcement makes it clear who carries it.
Customers “assume all risk for trades secuted by AI agents and for any use of your data by third-party LLM providers,” the company said in its announcement. It added that Robinhood “does not control, supervise, monitor, recommend, or audit agents.”
The warning is particularly sharper for the Loop feature, that lets agents run strategies on repeat. Once switched on, Loops “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.”
It will follow the customer’s rules “exactly as configured, including during periods of market volatility.”
Robinhood says it does not guarantee how Loops will perform in any given market condition and stresses that automated trading carries the same risk as manual trading. While customers can turn Loops off at any time, trades already placed by the Loop will not be automatically reversed.
Robinhood’s warnings focus on what could go wrong in a single account.
Broader Agentic concerns
Meanwhile, regulators and researchers are already more worried about what happen when thousands of agents trade at once.
Bank of England Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden warned in June that autonomous AI agents could “amplify volatility in stress”and trigger a “market meltdown,” adding that existing financial regulation wasn’t built for agentic.
Her main worry is herding, where many trading agents react to a news in the same way at the same time, turning a small market move into a sharp one.
In a study by Wharton and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, AI-powered trading agents in a simulated environment colluded with one another, fixing prices to make a collective profit, even though the bots had no explicit communication channel. The researchers found that AI agents can sustain above-market profits without communication, agreement or intent, which makes regulation even more challenging.
For now, these risks remain largely theoretical, as the technology is still young and few people use it. The warnings and studies above apply to AI trading in general, not specifically to Robinhood’s agents. Nevertheless, they are a reminder that agentic trading carries real risks, however convenient it may sound.
7:42 UTC: This story was updated to focus on the risks of Robinhood’s AI trading agents, including warnings from Robinhood’s own diclosures, regulators and academic research. The headline was changed accordingly. Read CoinDesk’s earlier coverage of the announcement here.
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