Robinhood CEO Says New AI-Driven Agent Apps Are Safe

Joining us now live from that summit is the chairman and CEO of Robinhood, Vlad Tenev. Vlad, great to have you back on the program. You said last night that you're basically putting the power of hedge funds into every trader's pocket. Explain that. That's right. I mean, we are in unprecedented times. You you hear that said a lot, but superintelligence is changing how we create and how we do everything. And Robinhood, we're focused on the financial aspect of this. And what what can happen if you plug if you safely plug in this super intelligence into your Robinhood account, and we take all the capabilities that Robinhood offers, which we announced 16 new ones last night, but think of it as the ability to trade any asset twenty four seven, and we're really building the infrastructure for that. And with, Robinhood agents, we can now plug, Frontier Intelligence into all these assets and allow your intelligence to to help you trade these things. And we also introduced agent apps, which allow you to plug in unique data sources. So things like unusual whales, token terminal Mhmm. Satellite. We have satellite imagery where you can actually tap into real time satellite views of parking lots if you wanna import that into your trading strategy. And and we also have the ability to run agent loops. So these are autonomous runs where the agent can actually perform actions for you in your Robinhood account while you're sleeping. So we're we're very excited about what this unlocks, and it's really just about making it clear to our active traders who are the foundation of our business that you're at a disadvantage trading anywhere besides Robinhood. Well, I am curious, just specifically on the agent, on the agent apps. I mean, how are you making money off that? Is that from subscriptions or just a share of the agent app fees? I mean I mean, what's the what's the direct, financial benefit to you? Yeah. So there's, like, three different potential monetization paths that you can think of here. One is just subscriptions. So these app developers are charging subscriptions, and they're actually offering deals where, you know, you get you get free usage for the first month. And, you know, in some cases, through Robinhood agent apps or marketplace, you can save money. It's not just easier to integrate with Robinhood in your trading, but you could actually save money compared to getting the subscription directly or elsewhere. So there's a subscription, and we take a piece of that for operating the marketplace. There's also just the trading activity, which we monetize normally on our platform, and and we get that. And then for now, we're we're offering free usage, through OpenAI of GPT six Luna till the end of the year, but there's also monetization on the AI model serving layer if you're using, you know, one of the one of the premium models that costs money. Talk a little bit more about what the users are actually going to see when they use this, trading agent. Do they just see the completed order, or do they get a little bit of insight into the rationale behind, you know, every single trade? What is the model looking at? What kind of risk limits is this agent looking at? Yeah. And, you know, if you, we we gave a pretty cool demo of all this. So if the viewers wanna get in deeper, we I encourage you to check that out. But, basically, what this is is it's a separate account. So for those of you that have Robinhood, we allow you to separate your assets into multiple accounts. Of course, we have your main Robinhood account, but we also have retirement. We have joint accounts. We now offer trusts. And we've introduced an agentic account, which is like a separate money bucket away from your retirement, away from your main brokerage account, and you can choose to move money into an agentic account. And you can think of it as like a financial sandbox, you know, to make sure that your agent doesn't go and just trade all of your money. You have to make affirmative moves to actually move money and assets into the agentic account. By default, trade approvals are on, so you'll you'll approve every trade that the agent wants to make. But if you want, you can turn that off. And then you also have agent loops where you can essentially create loops where the agent periodically does does its analysis, runs the strategy, and decides whether to trade. And that allows you to operate your agent even when you're not looking at your Robinhood app, like, Yeah. When you're sleeping. Because now, you know, equity markets are gonna be twenty four seven starting with Robinhood first. Yeah. So you'll always be able to capture opportunities. Well, I do wanna just ask you, though, about the liability. And I did look at the disclosure, and it's very clear that the disc that the the liability risk, at least for right now, for losses still rests with the the user rather than Robinhood itself. But have you talked with your tech team about this idea of whether the agents and and the technology behind it maybe hallucinates and does the wrong ticker or or just basically does something that the user did not intend it to do, does that loss or potential loss still fall on them, or would Robinhood actually bear some of that some of that responsibility? Yeah. I mean, I guess without going into, like, the legal nature of this question, what I'll tell you is we've spent a lot of effort and time making sure we mitigate the risk of hallucination and not not just hallucinations in the core models, which have been improving, but also making sure that it calls Robinhood services through well defined tool calls. And and there's actually a lot of engineering on what's called the harness layer, which is the layer that goes around the model and connects it to our system to make sure that only allowed tool calls, are are made possible. We spend a lot of effort, you know, making that really, really robust and making sure that, you know, the the reliability is is up to our standard. Yeah. And, you know, again, there's trade approvals so you can monitor what the what the agent is doing. There there's also we're investing more in predictable determinism so that the the outputs are interpretable. And we should also say that this isn't our first agentic product. We rolled out agentic trading a few months ago, and we've had over a 150,000 customers using it and actually building things. And, this is an extension of that. Of course, it's gonna be much bigger now that it's inside the Robinhood app, but I think we're building increasing confidence that these tools are not just powerful and open new capabilities, but but they're also they're also safe. And we believe that through our guardrails, we can actually introduce these products to users in a way that is safe and and also useful.