IBKR Autonomous Trading lets AI place orders for clients

Interactive Brokers has been building toward this step for months. In June it introduced an integration with Claude that let clients analyze portfolios and generate trading instructions for review, then expanded connections to ChatGPT, Grok and other AI tools. Autonomous Trading changes the endpoint of that pipeline: the same connected systems can now submit orders rather than stop at suggestions.

The design keeps control at the instruction level rather than the trade level. Clients write conditions in natural language—monitoring implied volatility, flagging positions below a set price, trimming holdings that exceed allocation limits, or selling 30-day covered calls when volatility reaches the 90th percentile of its 52-week range—and the AI acts within those parameters. Interactive Brokers describes the setup as subject to account restrictions and safeguards meant to manage risk, and CEO Milan Galik framed it as an extension of the firm's use of automation.

Access is not universal. Eligibility depends on country, regulatory and account status, and is subject to funding and other limits that may change. For the broker's active client base, the practical shift is that oversight moves from approving each order to defining the rules in advance—a change in the kind of attention trading requires, and in what happens when markets move outside the conditions a client anticipated.