Robinhood wants your next trade to happen while you’re asleep. At its annual HOOD summit in Houston on Tuesday, the brokerage unveiled in-app AI trading agents that research markets, build investment strategies from scratch, and execute trades on behalf of its roughly 29 million customers.

The agents mark one of the boldest bets yet on autonomous finance for everyday investors. Chief executive Vlad Tenev said the tools will hand retail traders capabilities “previously reserved for hedge funds and other Wall Street pros,” according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported from the event at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

What the agents can do

Tell the agent what you want in plain English and it does the legwork. In a demonstration viewed by Fortune, a user named their agent, picked a model, and started issuing instructions that ranged from the simple — “Buy $200 of Ford stock” — to complex multi-step assignments.

The agents can hold a conversation from a written prompt, dig through market data, and trade stocks, options, and crypto. One example from the WSJ: ask the agent to analyze how computing costs might affect certain companies, then open positions in their stocks based on follow-up questions. Another: tell it to “run the wheel strategy,” the popular options trade that generates income by selling cash-secured puts and covered calls.

This is Robinhood’s first non-technical agentic product for its mass customer base, and it removes most of the setup that algorithmic trading has historically demanded. No code, no API keys, no infrastructure to babysit.

Loops: standing orders for your portfolio

The headline feature is called Loops. It lets customers give an agent standing instructions to monitor the market and act when specified conditions are met — no fresh prompt required each time. Set a Loop to check the market every morning and execute when your criteria trigger, or run a continuous overnight strategy hunting for opportunities while you sleep.

That’s the line the industry will remember: agents as the driverless cars of Wall Street, trading stocks, options, bitcoin, and prediction-market contracts even when the investor isn’t looking. It’s a genuine shift in how retail trading works, from click-to-trade to set-and-forget.

Pick your model: OpenAI or Anthropic

Rather than locking users into one model, Robinhood lets customers choose. CoinDesk reported that agents can run on models from OpenAI or Anthropic, and the Fortune demo showed three options on the table: OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna, GPT-6 Sol, and Anthropic’s Opus 4.8.

Robinhood is also opening its agents to outside data through Agent Apps, which plug third-party financial data and tools into the agent’s decisions. That includes options flow data from Unusual Whales, market data from Nasdaq, crypto data from Token Terminal, and government activity tracked by Quiver Quantitative. The brokerage is selling that data access to power agent research.

Demand for the concept already looks real. Robinhood says more than 150,000 agentic accounts have been created since it opened its trading infrastructure to outside AI agents via an MCP tool earlier this year, generating millions of calls to its tools each day. The embedded version drops the technical barrier entirely.

The guardrails (and the off switch)

Handing an AI model access to your money invites an obvious question: what happens when the model gets a trade wrong?

Robinhood built in several guardrails. The agent gets its own dedicated trading account, and at launch it cannot borrow on margin — it can only touch money placed in that account. Users can set limits on how much the agent can trade at a time. And by default, Robinhood requires customers to approve every trade the agent proposes. You can turn that protection off, but the company is clearly hoping most people don’t.

“I would think of the agent as an extension, like a trading tool that’s mainly for research that can execute trades,” Gina Pasqua-Abeles, Robinhood’s senior director of product management, told CoinDesk. “We do expect users to still have some level of oversight over what their agent is doing.”

The same Tuesday rollout included more for active traders: weekend stock trading through Bruce ATS, perpetual futures for eligible U.S. customers, and prediction contracts tied to corporate earnings metrics. The message from Houston was clear — Robinhood wants to own the most active trader’s entire day, and now the overnight hours too.

The bigger picture

Robinhood’s launch is part of an industry-wide push to put AI tools inside how everyday Americans research, plan, and execute investments. Decades ago, mom-and-pop traders had to call a broker and pay a fat commission on every trade. Commission-free trading was Robinhood’s first revolution. Agentic trading could be its second — and a far stranger one.

The stakes are higher this time. A bad trade suggestion is one thing; a bad autonomous trade is money gone while you slept. Robinhood’s guardrails look sensible, but the real test will be the first market crash where thousands of Loops fire at once. If retail agents all react to the same signals, regulators will have a new species of flash crash to investigate.

Still, the direction is unmistakable. Financial AI is moving from analysis and recommendations toward direct action. Robinhood just made that shift available to 29 million people.

Frequently asked questions

What are Robinhood AI trading agents? In-app AI agents that analyze markets, build investment strategies from plain-English prompts, and execute trades on your behalf. They’re powered by OpenAI and Anthropic models.

What is Robinhood Loops? A coming feature that lets an agent run a trading strategy repeatedly on standing instructions — for example, checking the market every morning and trading when set conditions occur, even while you’re not logged in.

Do Robinhood AI agents trade without permission? By default, no. Agents require you to approve every trade they propose, though you can turn that protection off. They also can’t borrow on margin and only touch money in their dedicated account.

Which AI models power Robinhood’s trading agents? Customers can choose between models from OpenAI and Anthropic, including OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna and GPT-6 Sol and Anthropic’s Opus 4.8.

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, CoinDesk, Fortune, Tech Startups