Robinhood Launches AI That Can Trade 24/7, With Users Taking the Risk

Robinhood’s new AI trading product comes with a sensible default: each trade needs manual approval. Turn that setting off, or give an agent a recurring instruction, and the software can keep working without you.

That distinction matters. Robinhood Agents is designed to analyze markets, build strategies and place trades around the clock. Robinhood isn’t promising a guarded co-pilot that quietly fixes every decision. It is putting more of the work in the agent’s hands, while leaving the risk with the customer.

An Agent With Its Own Account

Robinhood announced Robinhood Agents at HOOD Summit 2026 in Houston. The in-app system can analyze markets, create strategies and trade on a customer’s behalf, according to Robinhood’s announcement.

The setup asks for three things: a name for the agent, a dedicated agentic trading account and a model from one of several AI labs, including OpenAI. Usage of OpenAI GPT-Luna is free until the end of the year.

The dedicated account is a useful boundary. An agent can only access money inside that account. It cannot draw on the rest of the customer’s Robinhood balance.

Manual approval is also enabled by default during setup. Customers can adjust the setting later, which gives them a choice between reviewing each trade and allowing the agent to act within their strategy and limits.

Robinhood says more than 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts since it launched third-party agentic trading in May. Those agents use Robinhood’s tools almost 30 million times a day. Those figures show frequent interaction with the tools, though they don’t reveal how many trades were approved, rejected or profitable.

Loops Turn Strategies Into Standing Orders

The next step is Loops, a feature that is still coming soon. It turns a strategy into a standing instruction that the agent can execute repeatedly, including overnight.

That removes another deliberate bit of friction. Instead of waiting for a new request, the agent can revisit its instructions, check the market and act. Robinhood’s Loops disclosure says the feature may place, modify or cancel trades automatically without asking for approval on every transaction. That can happen while the customer is asleep or away from the device.

Robinhood says Loops will follow the customer’s rules exactly, including during volatile markets. It doesn’t guarantee how those rules will perform. Turning off a Loop stops future activity, but it doesn’t automatically reverse trades the Loop has already placed.

This is the product’s clearest design choice. The agent isn’t an assistant that stops at a suggested trade. It can become a persistent operator, working from a set of rules while the customer does something else.

Customers Carry the Trading Risk

Robinhood says customers assume all risk for trades executed by AI agents. It also says customers assume risk related to the use of their data by third-party large language model providers. The company says it doesn’t control, supervise, monitor, recommend or audit the agents.

That puts the burden in an awkward place. The customer sets the strategy and limits, and can require approval for each trade. If the agent later makes a poor decision within those permissions, Robinhood says the loss still belongs to the customer.

There are broader warnings too. Bank of England Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden has said autonomous AI agents could amplify volatility during stress. Researchers at Wharton and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology also found that AI trading agents could collude on prices in a simulation without an explicit communication channel.

Neither warning is specific to Robinhood’s agents. The broader risks remain largely theoretical, and the research does not show that Robinhood’s product behaves this way. Still, it shows why guardrails matter when software can make decisions at a speed and frequency that people cannot comfortably monitor.

Separate News on Crypto Perpetual Futures

Robinhood also announced US perpetual futures for BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK and HYPE. The contracts have no expiration date. Customers will be able to take long or short positions, with up to 10 times leverage on BTC and ETH and up to three times on the other assets.

Robinhood Derivatives will offer the contracts through Bitstamp. Through the end of the year, the announced fee is 0.01% per trade. The product will include stop-loss and take-profit orders, liquidation-price tracking and risk alerts.

Perpetual futures are planned for eligible US customers in the coming months. Robinhood didn’t say in the announcement whether its AI agents can trade these crypto contracts. That means users shouldn’t treat the AI agent and perpetual futures as one confirmed feature set, even though both were announced at the same summit.

Robinhood Agents itself is also still rolling out to eligible US customers. The result is a product with two levels of automation. The basic version stops for approval by default. Loops removes that pause and lets the agent keep working. More convenience also means less direct oversight, and the customer remains responsible for the result.