AI in action · Tools
Interactive Brokers Now Lets AI Place Orders Without Approval, Coinbase Let Agents Trade Perpetual Futures After a Five-Minute Code Change, and Robinhood's Approvals Are Optional: the Human Is Leaving the Loop
Interactive Brokers launched IBKR Autonomous Trading on October 21, 2026: eligible clients can connect an AI platform that monitors more than 75,000 stocks, options and ETFs and submits orders without approving each one, funded from a separate AI partition of the account. About 3,000 clients were invited in the first days, founder Thomas Peterffy said. The same day Coinbase enabled perpetual futures on more than 20 tokens and three US equity indexes for connected agents, after one agent's feature request was turned into a code change and deployed in about five minutes. Robinhood's in-app agents, launched in September, let customers switch order approvals off. No broker supervises the agents, and every one puts the losses on the customer.
The approval step that brokers used to describe as the safeguard is becoming a setting. On October 21, 2026 Interactive Brokers introduced IBKR Autonomous Trading, a service under which eligible clients authorise a connected AI platform to submit supported orders without approving each one individually, within instructions the client defines and the account's existing restrictions. The AI trades from a dedicated partition the client funds from the main account, across more than 75,000 listed stocks, options and ETFs worldwide, and can act on standing rules of the kind the broker's examples describe: trim any position above 10% of the portfolio back to 8%, or sell covered calls when implied volatility reaches a set level. Until now IBKR's AI integration, which works with ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Perplexity, produced instructions for the client to review. Founder Thomas Peterffy said about 3,000 clients had been invited in the preceding days and that eligibility, which depends on account history, country and regulation, would widen over the following weeks; chief executive Milan Galik called it the continuation of decades of automation.
Coinbase moved the same day, by a route that says as much about the technology as the product. Coinbase for Agents, launched in June, lets third-party models such as Claude and ChatGPT manage an Advanced Trade account through an open protocol. On October 21, according to Crypto Briefing, a user's agent submitted a request through the platform's feedback command asking for perpetual futures; Coinbase's own agent turned the request into a proposed code change, a human approved it, and it was deployed in about five minutes, after which connected agents could trade perpetual contracts on more than 20 tokens and, for US users, on three equity indexes: the US500, a technology index and an AI-company index. Perpetuals are leveraged, never expire and are funded every few hours, which is to say that an agent's request for a riskier instrument was granted in the time it takes to read this story.
Robinhood got there first. Its in-app Robinhood Agents, unveiled on September 29 and covered by PYMNTS on October 1, require no developer setup, trade from a separate agentic account that is the only money they can touch, and approve each order by default; the customer can turn approvals off, except for crypto in California, Connecticut and New York. More than 150,000 customers had opened agentic accounts by late September, agents were calling the broker's tools almost 30 million times a day, and a feature called Loops turns a strategy into a standing instruction that runs continuously. Robinhood's disclosures say it does not supervise, monitor or audit the agents, and that the loss from a bad trade is the customer's whether approvals are on or off. eToro and Public let customers connect their own agents by the same developer route Coinbase uses.
What the three have in common is the allocation of risk. Each broker fences the agent inside a partition or sub-account, each lets the customer remove the per-order approval, and each says the outcome belongs to the customer. That is the structure the FCA's Jessica Rusu was describing on October 19 when she said incident reporting "must extend to significant AI failures and near-misses," and the structure the Fed, OCC and FDIC were asking banks about when they asked how an autonomous system would be shut down. An adviser's test published by AAII this month found that an agent told to maximise profit made 13 round-trip trades in a day and that none of three agents beat an index fund. The brokers' answer is that the client wrote the instructions. The regulators' question, not yet answered anywhere, is what happens when ten thousand clients wrote the same ones.
Sources: Good Money Guide — Interactive Brokers Launches Autonomous AI Trading That Can Buy and Sell Shares Without Approval (Oct 21, 2026); FX News Group — Interactive Brokers launches Autonomous Trading (Oct 21, 2026); Crypto Briefing — Coinbase lets AI agents trade perps after a five-minute feedback loop (Oct 21, 2026); PYMNTS — Robinhood Lets AI Agents Trade Without Customer Sign-Off (Oct 1, 2026)