Robinhood announced Robinhood Agents on Tuesday at its HOOD Summit in Houston, a tool that executes trades autonomously on customer accounts within set limits. The feature marks an expansion of the platform’s agentic trading capability, which debuted in May 2026 with a tech-focused cohort.
The AI agent operates independently, researching markets, building strategies, and placing trades at any hour, including 2 a.m., while customers remain offline. Customers name their agent, open a separate account for it, select an AI model (including OpenAI options), and set trading limits. Agents can only access funds in their designated account. By default, customers must approve trades, though this requirement can be disabled.
“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, Vice President of Product Management at Robinhood.
Since the May launch, 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts. Robinhood’s agents now tap the platform’s tools 30 million times per day. The platform serves 27 million funded accounts overall.
Perpetual Futures Launch
Robinhood is also introducing crypto perpetual futures in the coming months, offering up to 10x leverage on bitcoin and ether. Leverage on SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK, and HYPE is capped at 3x. A 10% price move can wipe out a 10x leveraged position entirely.
Perpetual futures are crypto price bets that never expire and trade primarily on offshore exchanges. They account for the bulk of crypto trading volume, which reached 200 billion daily. Robinhood will offer perpetual futures through Bitstamp, which it acquired last year.
Trading fees for perpetual futures are set at 0.01% through the end of 2026. OpenAI’s GPT-Luna model will be free to use until the end of 2026 as well.
CEO Vlad Tenev framed the expansion as a competitive move. “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,” he said.
Autonomous Trading and Loops
AI agents differ fundamentally from chatbots. Rather than answering questions, agents take autonomous action within set parameters. Robinhood is developing a feature called Loops that will turn strategies into standing instructions executed repeatedly by agents, though the exact rollout timeline has not been specified.
Torsten Slok, Chief Economist at Apollo, warned that AI agents automatically shifting household cash to highest-paying accounts could cause banks to lose what he described as “a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans.” However, this risk remains largely theoretical since the technology is still in its infancy.
Thousands of agents running similar models on similar data could create systemic trading risks by piling into the same trades simultaneously, according to the source. This scenario is characterized as a potential future problem rather than a current reality.
