Robinhood Markets CEO Vlad Tenev Talks AI-Driven Agent Apps

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

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.

Vlad Tenev (0:24)

That's right, I mean, we are in unprecedented times.

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 can happen if you plug, if you safely plug in the superintelligence into your Robinhood account, and we take all of the capabilities that Robinhood offers, which we announced 16 new ones last night, but think of it as the ability to trade any asset 24-7, 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 help you trade these things. We also introduced agent apps, which allow you to plug in unique data sources, so things like unusual whales, token terminal, satellite. We have satellite imagery, where you can actually tap into real-time satellite views of parking lots, if you want to import that into your trading strategy. 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 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.

SPEAKER_2 (2:00)

Well, I am curious, specifically 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, what's the direct financial benefit to you?

Vlad Tenev (2:14)

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 get free usage for the first month. And in some cases, through Robinhood agent apps or Marketplace, you can save money.

It's not just easier to integrate with Robinhood in your training, but you can 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 we get that. And then for now, we're offering free usage through OpenAI of GPT-6 Luna till the end of the year.

But there's also monetization on the AI model serving layer. If you're using one of the premium models that cost money.

SPEAKER_4 (3:21)

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 every single trade? What is the model looking at? What kind of risk limits is this agent looking at?

Vlad Tenev (3:43)

Yeah, and we gave a pretty cool demo of all this. So if the viewers want to get in deeper, 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, 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 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 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 when you're sleeping.

Because now, equity markets are going to be 24-7, starting with Robinhood first. So you'll always be able to capture opportunities.

SPEAKER_2 (5:11)

Well, I do want to just ask you, though, about the liability. And I did look at the disclosure, and it's very clear that the liability risk, at least for right now, for losses, still rests with the user rather than Robinhood itself. But have you talked with your tech team about this idea of whether the agents and the technology behind it maybe hallucinates and does the wrong ticker or 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 responsibility?