Robinhood AI: every way to invest with AI on Robinhood

Until this year, "Robinhood AI" mostly meant research features inside the app. That changed on May 27, 2026, when Robinhood opened its brokerage to AI agents. There are now four distinct things people mean by the phrase, and they differ in what they can do with your money.

1. Cortex, an AI research assistant for Robinhood Gold members. It reads and summarises. It does not trade.
2. Robinhood Agents, an agent you set up in the Agents tab of the Robinhood mobile app. It can place trades in a dedicated Agentic account.
3. Agentic Trading for outside agents. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Grok, Perplexity and other clients connect through Robinhood's Trading MCP link and sign in on Robinhood's page. They can read all your accounts and trade in the Agentic account.
4. Third-party apps on the same official connection, such as Walnut, which use the Robinhood Trading MCP so you get agent trading without configuring an AI client yourself.

The common thread in options two to four is the Agentic account: a second Robinhood account that an agent can trade in, kept apart from your main account. You fund it yourself in the Robinhood app. The agent can see your main account but cannot trade in it. That separation is the single most important fact about AI trading on Robinhood, and it applies whichever agent you choose. For the mechanics, see our guide to Robinhood Agentic Trading.

Cortex is the oldest of the four and the narrowest. It is available to Robinhood Gold members and produces Digests that summarise what may be moving a particular stock, plus Portfolio Digests that cover the stocks you hold.

It is useful when the question is "why did this move today?" and you want the answer next to the chart instead of in a search engine. It is a reading tool. It does not build a plan, it does not hold target weights, and it does not place orders. If you only want explanations of price moves and you already pay for Gold, Cortex may be all you need.

Robinhood Agents is Robinhood's own trading agent. You open the Agents tab in the mobile app, give the agent a name, open an Agentic account, choose which AI model it uses, and fund the account. From then on you chat with it and it can act in that account.

Three details matter. The chat is paid from a prepaid token balance, with a free starting balance, so heavy use costs money as you go. Approvals are on by default, meaning the agent asks before it trades unless you change that setting. And it is mobile only for now, so there is no desktop version.

Its strength is that nothing has to be installed or connected: it lives where many Robinhood customers already spend their time. Its limit is that it is a general chat agent. Whether it holds a fixed set of target weights for you, or invests on a schedule, depends on what you ask of it in each conversation and on what Robinhood ships, so check the app for the current feature set.

The Agentic Trading program lets an AI client you already use connect to Robinhood. You add the Robinhood Trading MCP link, https://agent.robinhood.com/mcp/trading, to the client and sign in on Robinhood's own page. Robinhood's support article names Claude Code, Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Codex, Codex CLI, Cursor and Grok, and says Perplexity, Replit, Poke and others work too.

Setup is the cost of entry. In ChatGPT you first turn on Developer Mode under Settings, Security & login, then add the connector. In Claude you add it as a custom connector. You need a primary individual investing account in good standing, and the Agentic account the setup creates counts toward Robinhood's limit of 10 self-directed individual accounts. Our Robinhood MCP server guide and the walkthrough on connecting Robinhood to an AI assistant cover the steps.

Once connected, the reach is wide. Robinhood's MCP has tools for stocks, options and crypto, plus watchlists and market data. That breadth cuts both ways. If you tell the agent to act without asking, Robinhood says it can trade without your confirmation, and a general-purpose assistant has no built-in idea of what your portfolio is supposed to look like. You supply the plan in each conversation.

This route suits people who already use Claude or ChatGPT every day, like having their AI in one place, and are comfortable doing a one-time setup.

Walnut connects to Robinhood through the same official agent connection, the Robinhood Trading MCP that Claude and ChatGPT use. The difference is that you do not configure an AI client. You choose Robinhood on Walnut's Brokerage page, or ask the Walnut assistant to connect it, and sign in on Robinhood's own page. Walnut never sees your Robinhood password.

During that sign-in, Robinhood offers to open the second account called Agentic. Saying yes is what allows buying. You add money to the Agentic account in the Robinhood app; Walnut never moves money. Your main Robinhood account stays view-only to Walnut.

What Walnut does with that connection:

• Reads all your Robinhood accounts. US stock and ETF positions, including average cost, so the assistant can answer questions about your real gains and how concentrated you are.
• Buys baskets. A basket is a set of stocks or ETFs with target weights, for example AI chips: NVDA 30%, AVGO 25%, TSM 25%, AMD 20%. You enter a dollar amount and Walnut splits it by weight. You can do this from the basket's Invest dialog or by asking the assistant, "put $200 into my AI chips basket in Robinhood".
• Invests on a schedule. A recurring investment spends a fixed amount weekly, monthly or on another schedule, split across the weights, using cash already in the Agentic account. You approve it once when you set it up.
• Asks before buying. A one-time buy is placed only after you approve it.

It runs on the web and in the Walnut apps for iOS and Android, and it is free to start, with a paid plan, Walnut Unlimited, for heavy assistant use.

The limits are deliberate and worth knowing up front. Walnut places buys only; there are no sells through Walnut yet. Orders are market orders by dollar amount during regular market hours. It covers US stocks and ETFs, with no options or crypto through Walnut. Robinhood's $1 minimum per stock applies to every leg of a basket. Walnut's own connector for Claude and ChatGPT has no order tools, so trading happens inside Walnut. Walnut is not a broker or an investment adviser, and orders execute at Robinhood under Robinhood's rules.

The table makes one pattern clear. Cortex explains, and the other three can act. Among the three that act, the main differences are where you use them and how much of the plan the software holds for you. A general agent waits for instructions each time. Walnut keeps the basket and its weights, so the instruction can be as short as an amount.

Say you want to put $200 a month into a simple five-ETF portfolio and stop thinking about it between paydays. In Walnut you would build a basket with these target weights:

• VTI (total US stock market) 40%
• VXUS (international stocks) 20%
• QQQ (Nasdaq-100) 15%
• SCHD (US dividend stocks) 15%
• BND (US bonds) 10%

The ETFs are illustrations of a common shape, chosen to make the arithmetic readable, and are not a recommendation. You would pick your own.

1. Connect and fund

You connect Robinhood, say yes when Robinhood offers the Agentic account, and move money into it in the Robinhood app. Some people set up a repeating transfer in Robinhood so the cash lands a few days before the investment date. Walnut does not pull money from your bank.

2. Set the recurring investment

On the basket you open Invest, choose Recurring, enter $200 and pick monthly on the 3rd. You approve the plan once. Each month the $200 is split by weight:

• VTI: $80
• VXUS: $40
• QQQ: $30
• SCHD: $30
• BND: $20

Every leg is well above Robinhood's $1 minimum, so all five buys go through as dollar-amount market orders during regular hours. Over a year that is $2,400 in, with $960 to VTI and $240 to BND, in the proportions you set.

3. When the cash is short

Suppose on the 3rd the Agentic account holds $150 because a transfer has not arrived. Walnut does not buy a partial amount and does not borrow. It checks the cash in the Agentic account, sees it cannot cover $200, skips the run and tells you. It retries on the following days, so if the transfer lands on the 5th, the month's $200 goes in then. It never doubles up later to catch up on a month it already invested.

4. Asking about the result

Because Walnut reads every Robinhood account with average cost, you can ask the assistant how the basket is doing against its targets, what your overall gain is, or how much of your total money now sits in large US tech once QQQ and your older holdings in the main account are counted together. That last question is the one people tend not to answer by hand, because it means adding up positions across two accounts.

Searches for a Robinhood AI trading bot turn up two very different things, and it helps to separate them.

The first is the official route described above. An agent connects through Robinhood's Trading MCP, you sign in on Robinhood's own page, and the agent can trade only in an Agentic account that you chose to fund. Your password is never handed to the agent or the app.

The second is the older category of third-party bots that ask for your Robinhood username and password, or for a session token, and log in as you. That is a different and riskier arrangement. The bot has the same access you do, across your main account, and nothing separates the money it can trade from the rest. If a service asks for your Robinhood password, it is not using Agentic Trading. We cover the wider question in are AI trading bots legit.

It is also worth being clear about what Walnut is for. It buys baskets, once or on a schedule, for people investing over years. It does not trade frequently, does not sell, and does not try to time the market. If what you want is a bot that trades in and out many times a week, Walnut is the wrong tool, and a general agent given that instruction will happily generate a lot of taxable short-term trades.

If you mostly want to understand your holdings and you already pay for Robinhood Gold, start with Cortex. It answers the daily "what happened?" question and costs nothing extra.

If you invest a set amount into the same group of funds or stocks every month and want that to happen without opening an app each time, Walnut is built around exactly that job: the basket holds the weights, the recurring plan holds the schedule, and you approve once. It is also the shortest path if you have never configured an AI connector and do not want to.

If you already spend your working day in Claude or ChatGPT and want one assistant for everything, connecting Robinhood's MCP to it keeps your AI in one place. You get the widest set of tools, including options and crypto, and you take on the setup and the job of telling it what your plan is.

If you never use a computer for investing and want to try an agent with the least friction on your phone, Robinhood Agents is the native choice, and approvals being on by default is a sensible starting point.

These are not exclusive. Using Cortex for research alongside one agent for buying is a reasonable combination, as long as you know which agent can place orders in your Agentic account.

Approvals

Robinhood Agents asks before trading by default. An outside agent asks unless you tell it to act without asking, in which case Robinhood says it can trade without confirming. Walnut asks before every one-time buy and has you approve a recurring plan once. Decide which level of hands-off you actually want before you fund the account.

The view-only main account

Every agent route reads your main account and trades only in the Agentic one. That is a safety feature, and it also means the money for agent purchases has to be in the Agentic account. A common surprise is asking an agent to buy something and finding the main account's cash untouchable.

Who is responsible for the trades

Robinhood's support pages say it does not control, supervise or audit third-party agents, and that you take on the risk of their trades. That applies to Claude, ChatGPT, Walnut and any other outside agent. Orders still execute at Robinhood under its rules; see Robinhood's fee schedule for costs.

Taxes on frequent trading

An agent that buys and sells often in a taxable account produces short-term gains, which the IRS taxes at ordinary income rates (see Topic no. 409). Buying on a schedule and holding avoids most of that, which is one reason a recurring basket plan is a calmer use of an agent than a stream of trades.

Robinhood's launch announcement, Robinhood is now open to agents, and Axios coverage from May 27, 2026. The Agentic Trading product page and the Agentic Trading overview describe the MCP link, supported clients, account rules and Robinhood's position on third-party agents. Setting up an agent covers Robinhood Agents, and Cortex covers the research assistant. Short-term gain treatment is in IRS Topic no. 409. Walnut is not a broker or an investment adviser. This guide is educational and not personalized investment or tax advice.