In the latest sign of AI’s growing footprint in online commerce, Robinhood announced on Wednesday that users can now instruct agents to make purchases on their behalf using the Robinhood Gold card. To illustrate the potential of agentic shopping, the company cited examples: “A sneakerhead can tell their agent to buy a coveted new release in their size whenever it drops below $300” and “A foodie can instruct their agent to book the most exclusive restaurant reservation in town as soon as their preferred date and time becomes available.”
As a practical matter, the agent is not given the same card number as the customer’s Robinhood Gold card, but is instead assigned a related virtual card that can be deleted at any time. The service also comes with additional safety precautions, including options to put a monthly cap on the agent’s spending, or to receive notifications for agentic transactions that exceed a given dollar amount. And, as with its traditional Robinhood Gold card, purchases carried out by an agent will receive 3% cash back.
Robinhood is not the only company to offer agentic shopping with a credit card. The payment firms Stripe and Ramp offer virtual cards for agents too, while Visa and Mastercard have rolled out related processing and security services for such cards. But Robinhood’s move stands out since it is the first big retail brand to offer agentic credit card shopping to its users. The company currently has around 700,000 Robinhood Gold customers, whose purchases could meaningfully increase both the volume and scope of agentic payments.
While Robinhood and others, including Coinbase, are clearly bullish on agentic commerce, practical obstacles remain. Those include persuading a critical number of merchants to accept payments from agents, while also determining who is responsible for failed and fraudulent transactions. There will also be a technical learning curve for many consumers.
In order to make agentic purchases, Robinhood Gold cardholders must direct their agents to connect with the company’s MCP, an acronym that describes a type of AI software that can receive and understand commands delivered by an agent. According to Abhishek Fatehpuria, a product VP at Robinhood, the company’s initial wave of AI offerings is aimed primarily at a subset of users who are particularly tech savvy.
“We want to encourage early adopters of agents to bring their own tools,” said Fatehpuria. “It’s still a nascent phase [and we] want to learn from that audience.”
In addition to its new credit card service, Robinhood also announced that users will be able to engage in agent-based trading. In practice, this will mean describing various trading activities—such as rebalancing a portfolio in response to certain events or jumping on a stock at a given price—and relying on the agent to execute them.
“Our mission has always been to democratize finance for all, and now, that mission extends to AI agents,” said Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, in a statement.