Robinhood is no stranger to controversy. From halting trades during 2021's meme stock rally to paying a record $70 million fine for misleading customers and app outages, the online brokerage has dealt with its fair share of criticism. Now, the company's decision to roll out artificial intelligence-assisted agentic trading could open the door to more scrutiny.
In May, Robinhood announced that it was releasing a new feature on its commission-free stock trading app that will allow investors to automate trades — among other functionalities — using AI.
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AI's track record on providing financial advice remains spotty, and there is a general distrust of how the technology handles sensitive data. So while agentic trading features may be pioneering, they warrant considerable caveats.
What AI can (and cannot) do for investors
Since the first public stock markets in the early 1600s, investment decisions have been clouded by human emotion. Although agentic trading aims to remove that from the equation, it's still not a crystal ball.
"People basically want a money-printing machine," says Josip Rupena, CEO of Milo, a Miami-based crypto-backed mortgage lender. "They think [AI] can do all the trades for them. They don't have to monitor it, and they'll get all their time back."
Robinhood has stopped short of making those claims, but the company says on its website that its agentic trading tool offers "a world of opportunities to uplevel and automate your trading," including the ability to analyze your holdings, rebalance your portfolio and execute trades on your behalf.
But it involves more than just handing over the keys and giving AI full autonomy. Robinhood's agentic feature is dependent on rules-based operations wherein users provide criteria that the technology then executes using their accounts.
According to Robinhood, that could entail a command to create a portfolio using "little-known tickers across the AI supply chain," automate a trading strategy to buy $100 worth of a specific stock each time its price decreases by 2% in one day, rebalance your holdings so no single stock has more than a 20% weighting, or analyze market data in order to create bull and bear theses for an investment case.
Robinhood isn't alone in its AI aspirations. In February, centralized crypto exchange Coinbase rolled out agentic wallets. That feature allows users to "equip agents with autonomous spending, earning and trading capabilities in minutes with built-in security guardrails" for trading crypto, according to its announcement. (Robinhood's agentic trading is currently limited to stocks and exchange-traded funds, or ETFs.)
However, the success of agentic trading is largely contingent upon AI establishing trust with investors who are willing to share vulnerable information — something most people have been reluctant to do.
A recent Credit One Bank survey found that while just over 1 in 4 consumers have sought financial advice from an AI-powered app or chatbot over the past year, only 20% have made significant financial decisions based primarily on AI's recommendations.
AI agents like Robinhood's mark the next evolution. Whereas bots are designed to follow fixed rules and answer questions, AI agents are autonomous and goal-driven. They can reason, plan and execute tasks across different platforms without human intervention.
"These agents historically have been considered bots," Rupena says. "Now, you have to have a mechanism for recognizing that they are legitimate with a real purpose."
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Trust in AI is building among younger users
For now, agentic trading's ability to execute buy and sell orders on investors' behalf is the head-turner. But Rupena says he believes we could eventually see AI agents interacting with financial services companies — like mortgage lenders, banks, wealth management firms and tax service providers — for full-spectrum money management.
That would necessitate broader adoption and establishing trust at a faster rate than we're seeing today, with security concerns being a major hurdle. Credit One Bank found that 36% of U.S. consumers cite data privacy as their biggest concern about using AI for financial planning.
"As humans, are we going to trust them with all of our financial information? It seems like we are already, in bits and pieces," Rupena says. "But is this next iteration going to be that these agents will know more about us financially than we do, have more data and therefore can give us better financial advice?"
For younger generations, the tide is already turning. Credit One Bank's survey also showed that more than 1 in 3 millennials have sought financial advice from an AI tool, while 65% of respondents believe Gen Z is the generation that is most likely to trust AI over human advisors.
That belief aligns with Robinhood's core demographic: young, digitally native retail investors. The median age of a Robinhood user is 35, and millennials and Gen Zers make up over 75% of the more than 25 million funded accounts on the platform.
But whether agentic stock trading merits that trust is yet to be seen. Rupena says he believes that if it proves to be better than humans, we should — in theory — give it control. In practice, there are reasons to tread carefully since it involves your wealth.
"There's real money behind it," he says. "If it works, then that's amazing. We all want that. But if it doesn't, then who's to blame?"
