Robinhood announces AI agent for customers that trades around the clock, plus 10x crypto perps

Nasdaq-listed Robinhood HOOD$116.21·Market Closed is launching an AI tool that can trade on customers’ behalf, even when they’re away.

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. Customers name their agent, open a separate account for it, pick an AI model from labs including OpenAI, and set their limits. OpenAI’s GPT-Luna model will be free to use until the end of the year.

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 without human approval. Not everyone is comfortable with that. Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok warned on Sunday that if households let AI agents shift their cash automatically to the highest-paying accounts, banks could lose “a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans.”

Trading raises a different problem. Thousands of agents running similar models on similar data could pile into the same trades at the same moment, turning a small market move into a sharp one. For now, these risks remain largely theoretical, since the technology is still in its infancy.

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.

“Whether you’re an expert or are just getting started with AI, you’re at a disadvantage if you’re not using Robinhood,” said Abhishek Fatehpuria, Robinhood’s vice president of product management.

There are guardrails. An agent can only touch the money in its own account. Customers must approve each trade by default, although they can switch that off.

Robinhood is also bringing perpetual futures, a hugely popular crypto product, to eligible U.S. customers inside its app.

Perpetual futures, or perps, are bets on crypto prices that never expire. They trade mostly on offshore exchanges and account for the bulk of crypto trading, with daily volume topping $200 billion.

Traders post a deposit, called margin, and the exchange lets them control a position several times its size. They can bet on prices rising or falling. Robinhood will allow up to 10x leverage on bitcoin and ether, and 3x on SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK and HYPE. That means a 10% move against a 10x position can wipe it out.

Robinhood will offer perps through Bitstamp, the crypto exchange it acquired last year, and charge just 0.01% per trade through the end of the year.

Together, the two launches show Robinhood wants to be where active traders are, with leverage on tap and an AI that can place bets at 2 a.m.

“We’re making Robinhood the best place in the world for active traders by delivering tools once reserved for hedge funds, big banks, and quant firms,” said CEO Vlad Tenev.

Both products still need to roll out. Robinhood Agents is “coming soon” to eligible U.S. customers, and perps are due in the coming months.