Robinhood opens share trading to AI chatbots in brokerage ‘arms race’

TL;DR:

• Robinhood is launching “agentic trading accounts” that let clients use Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to build portfolios, automate strategies and place orders.
• The move follows eToro’s agentic trading launch two months ago and Public’s earlier rollout, with Sui Group calling the segment “a trillion-dollar opportunity”.
• For UK retail investors, the bigger question is whether the FCA’s consumer-duty framework can keep pace with brokerage models built around AI agents that “may be difficult to monitor or stop in real time” — Robinhood’s own warning.

Robinhood will allow retail clients to delegate share-trading decisions to AI chatbots, the California-based brokerage said on Wednesday. New “agentic trading accounts” will be able to interact with Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to construct portfolios, run automated strategies and execute orders — a move that turns brokerage features that previously involved a human pressing the button into something AI agents can do autonomously.

The brokerage race

The launch comes two months after rival platform eToro introduced agentic trading on its app, and follows Tiger Global-backed Public’s roll-out of agents that investors can prompt to execute trades. Stephen Mackintosh, chief investment officer at Sui Group Holdings — a backer of AI-trading start-up Nof1 — predicted “an arms race this year among all of these brokerages to offer agentic trading to their users”, describing the addressable market as “a trillion-dollar opportunity”.

The evidence that AI actually beats market returns is thin. Nof1’s October 2025 experiment, which gave six leading large language models $10,000 each to trade on crypto-derivatives venue Hyperliquid, found models finished in profit only six times across 32 sets of results, with significant differences in bias and a “high sensitivity to seemingly trivial prompt changes”. Mackintosh himself cautioned that “out of the box LLMs are not suited to generating [returns]”.

What this means for UK investors

UK retail investors do not yet have direct access to Robinhood’s agentic accounts, and the eToro launch happened on a separate regulatory footing. But the precedent matters: the Financial Conduct Authority’s Consumer Duty rules require firms to ensure products deliver good outcomes, and AI-driven trading sits awkwardly in that framework. Robinhood’s own disclosure that “AI-driven strategies may perform poorly under certain market conditions, move quickly, and may be difficult to monitor or stop in real time” reads less like a marketing line and more like a prompt for UK regulatory attention.

Amanda Fischer of Better Markets put the broader concern plainly: “The typical retail investor does not benefit from more trading, but Robinhood’s fee income certainly benefits.”

Looking forward

UK brokerages from Hargreaves Lansdown to AJ Bell will face a strategic question over the next twelve months: how to respond if rivals offer AI-agent trading without undermining suitability and best-execution obligations. The FCA’s existing framework was designed for humans making decisions with AI assistance, not for autonomous agents placing trades. Updated guidance — or a public statement that the existing rules already apply — looks increasingly necessary.