As the tech industry rallies around AI agents, some companies are building capabilities to enable AI agents to make payments and trade stocks on users’ behalf.
Stock trading app Robinhood is also moving in that direction: The company on Wednesday said it is launching support for AI agentic trading, as well as a new agentic credit card.
Robinhood said users on its platform can now create a separate account for their AI agents and connect them to a dedicated wallet. While these agents would be able to read and analyze users’ portfolios to come up with trading strategies and suggest investments, they’ll only be able to access the pre-loaded balance in the dedicated wallet to place orders.
Users will get notifications of all trades their AI agent makes, and will be able to monitor their activities within the Robinhood app itself. For some trades, agents will show a preview that users may have to approve before the order is executed. The company said it has also built in fraud detection protection, in which a team from Robinhood would review suspicious trades and help users resolve disputes.
Robinhood says users can connect their AI agents to its Model Context Protocol (MCP) service to do things like analyze concentration risk and sector exposure, execute trades, or look through analyst notes to identify new investment opportunities across various sectors.
The agentic trading feature is launching in beta and only allows stock trading right now. The company says it plans to add support for options, crypto, event contracts, futures, and prediction markets soon.
Robinhood is also debuting a new virtual credit card meant to be used by AI agents. With this card, users can connect their AI agents to the company’s banking MCP server to enable them to make payments.
The virtual card is currently only available to Robinhood Gold Card holders, who can link their account to this new card.
Users can set monthly limits on this virtual card, and can choose if their AI agent should seek approval every time it makes a payment. The company said its Robinhood Platinum Card will also get support for a similar virtual an agentic card feature when it launches later this year.
Robinhood has been ramping up its AI efforts for the past few years. The company acquired AI-powered research platform Pluto in 2024, and last year added an AI assistant that offers investment advice.
“We’ve heard a lot of demand from our customers to bring their own tools, LLMs, and agents, and connect them to Robinhood. That is why we are launching our new products,” Abhishek Fatehpuria, VP of product at Robinhood, told TechCrunch over a call.
Robinhood is not alone in enabling AI agents to make payments, with major players like Stripe, Amazon, Google, and newer startups like Prava Pay building products that give AI agents the ability to buy stuff on users’ behalf.
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