Robinhood unveiled an agentic credit card. Should you trust AI to make purchases?
You may already use AI to automate some tasks at work or help solve problems. Now, Robinhood wants you to incorporate AI into your financial plan.
The company recently announced its agentic credit card feature for Robinhood Gold Card cardholders, alongside agentic trading. With these tools, you can link a third-party AI agent (such as ChatGPT or Claude) to your Robinhood account and allow it to purchase items with your credit card or make trades within your investment portfolio.
That means AI can now do everything from booking a hard-to-get dinner reservation to tracking the price of an item you want and buying it when it falls below a specified threshold.
“Our mission has always been to democratize finance for all, and now, that mission extends to AI agents,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in the announcement.
But there are some things you should keep in mind before you let AI handle your spending for you. Here’s more about agentic credit cards and some risks to consider.
Read more: ChatGPT can now see your bank account. Is it worth the risk?
How Robinhood’s agentic credit card works
To use Robinhood’s agentic credit card, you’ll need to connect your preferred AI agent to the Robinhood Banking MCP (Model Context Protocol) and create a virtual card for your agent. This virtual card is unique from your regular Robinhood Gold Card.
The AI agent won’t be able to access your actual credit card number or broader Robinhood account information. Instead, it can only access the virtual card, its transaction history, card details, and any policies you establish.
Once it’s set up, your AI agent will be able to “scan for the best prices, monitor availability, and make purchases automatically based on your instructions,” according to Robinhood. You can tell it what you want to buy and what price you’re willing to pay, and it’ll handle the rest.
For example, let’s say you’re planning a trip and tracking flight prices ahead of booking. You could tell your AI agent to purchase a round-trip flight to your destination on the dates you want when the price goes below $800, or whatever specific amount you’re willing to spend.
The feature is currently available to Robinhood Gold Card holders (which is waitlist only), and Robinhood says it will also be available with the Robinhood Platinum Card when it launches.
Read more: How to buy gold on Robinhood
Using AI for purchases
Robinhood says the agentic credit card is “one of the first products of its kind,” but it’s also the result of a growing trend toward using AI as a financial tool.
According to Plaid’s “2026 State of Intelligent Finance” research report, 55% of Americans used AI to help manage their finances in the past 12 months, while 53% said they expect AI to take the guesswork out of their financial decisions.
Meanwhile, a January 2026 report from the Consumer Bankers Association said that “agentic payment tools have massive potential to disrupt the existing consumer payments landscape and revolutionize commerce.”
Other payment companies have also recently introduced similar agentic payment options.
Stripe’s Shared Payment Tokens (SPT) technology lets AI agents initiate payments with your permission and designated cards. Like the virtual cards Robinhood uses for agentic transactions, Stripe uses Mastercard- and Visa-issued agentic network tokens, which create unique digital card information. When your AI agent makes a transaction, it uses these tokens instead of your actual card information to make the purchase.
You could compare the process to tokenized payments you may already make with digital wallets, like Apple Pay or Google Pay. When you add a credit card to Apple Pay, for example, a device account number is created, which is unique from your original card account number. The device account number is used for Apple Pay purchases. Each time you transact, the only information shared is that device account number and a transaction-specific security code.
Of course, agentic payments still work differently, since they allow AI to transact for you. So even with tokenized transactions, agentic purchases carry unique risks.
Read more: Best rewards credit cards
Set limits for AI spending
Robinhood says it designed the agentic credit card experience “with safety and control as the top priority,” and there are some guardrails you can set for your AI agent. Those include monthly spending limits and notifications for any purchases the agent makes.
If you choose to approve each purchase, you’ll get a notification within your Robinhood Banking app before your AI agent can complete a transaction. If you don’t want to approve each purchase, you’ll be required to set a monthly spending limit for your agentic credit card.
Read more: How to use AI to improve your finances
What are the risks?
Even with spending limits and approval notifications, there are still risks to using AI to make purchases.
Whether you opt to approve each purchase or not, Robinhood says you are responsible for any purchases your AI makes with an agentic card.
In addition to your approved spending, unauthorized purchases and fraud are a major concern for some experts as these technologies grow.
Right now, tokenized virtual card numbers, spending limits, and notifications for purchase approval are the safeguards in place for agentic purchases. But it’s difficult to predict exactly what risks could emerge as the use of AI payments increases.
Speaking to Yahoo Finance recently about connecting financial information to AI agents, Eva Velasquez, CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center said, “At this point, don’t connect your financial accounts to an AI agent. Right now, the technology’s too new. The data sharing implications are still unknown.”
The Consumer Bankers Association report questioned available consumer protections for unauthorized transactions made by AI agents as well as how new scams and instances of fraud could develop alongside agentic payments, especially given a lack of regulation.
“… consumers may be liable for mistakes their agents make and these mistakes could be costly,” the report said. “These exceptions could have significant impacts on the evolution of consumer protection in connection with consumers’ use of agentic payment tools.”
