Six weeks, five brokers: the industry just handed AI agents the keys

Photo: BoliviaInteligente / Unsplash

Something shifted between late May and late June 2026. Five brokers, one after another, opened up their platforms to AI agents. We've already covered IBKR's rollout and Alpaca's agent-driven API growth as they happened. It wasn't the industry's first move either, TradeStation had already gated its own MCP connector back in January, but this six-week stretch is when it stopped being a handful of early movers and became a trend. Zoomed out, they're part of the same wave, and the differences between them matter more than the headlines suggest.

The timeline

• April 23 - Alpaca reports that monthly API usage growth jumped from single digits to roughly 30%, and attributes it to AI agents trading through the API rather than hand-written code. Ships a CLI and an enhanced MCP Server.
• May 27 - Robinhood launches Agentic Trading (beta, stocks only at first) plus an Agentic Credit Card for AI agents. Trades run inside a sandboxed, pre-funded wallet; some require an approval preview, others don't.
• June 1 - IBKR launches its Claude connector: equities and ETFs, market and limit orders, every draft trade requires manual approval. The same week, an independent developer ships an unofficial MCP server for Tastytrade, not an official Tastytrade product, but proof the community wasn't waiting for one.
• June 11 - Coinbase for Agents goes live. Crypto spot and derivatives, plus a payment protocol (x402) that lets the agent pay for data and services on its own. Autonomy is configurable, and can go as far as full execution with no per-trade approval.
• June 16 - Coinbase registers its AI adviser with the SEC, CFTC and NFA.
• June 22 - IBKR adds ChatGPT and Grok, and extends supported orders to options and futures.

The real story isn't "AI trading." It's how much oversight each one kept.

Line these up and a pattern falls out. IBKR never lets an agent submit an order; everything sits in a review tab until a human clicks approve. Robinhood's model is closer, notifications and previews, though not every trade gets one. Coinbase is the outlier: an agent can be handed full execution authority with nobody in the loop for each trade. Same underlying idea, three different amounts of human oversight built in by default.

Why this matters if you use Cresori

Whichever of these brokers you use, and Cresori connects to IBKR, Coinbase, Alpaca and others directly, the question worth asking isn't "does this platform support AI agents." It's "how much authority does my specific setup give one." Check the approval settings before you connect anything, not after. And the advice we keep repeating still holds: know exactly what access an agent has to your account, and revoke it the moment you're done using it.

Sources: Alpaca, April 23, TechCrunch on Robinhood, May 27, Robinhood newsroom, tasty-agent on PyPI, Interactive Brokers, June 1, Coinbase, June 11, Interactive Brokers, June 22.