Approval models

An approval model answers one question: before an agent’s order reaches the market, who or what has to say yes? Providers often offer more than one, so provider pages list every model they document, default path first.

Model	One line	Launch-broker examples
Separate account	The agent trades only in an account you fund for it	Robinhood, Coinbase (optional)
AI Partition	A funded partition inside your account where an eligible AI may trade without per-order approval	Interactive Brokers Autonomous Trading
Per-order confirm	The agent prepares each order; you confirm it in the broker’s app	Webull Cloud MCP, Robinhood with Trade approvals on
Draft, then you submit	The agent writes a non-binding instruction; you review and submit it	Interactive Brokers AI Integration
None at the broker	The broker executes what the agent sends; any approval lives in your client	Alpaca, Webull local OpenAPI MCP

Blocked is not an approval model. A provider that refuses outside agents gets status: blocked in its YAML header instead. See the overview.

How models combine

Models stack. Robinhood puts the agent in a separate account and lets you add per-order approval on top.¹² Interactive Brokers starts every client on draft-then-submit and requires a track record there before the AI Partition opens.³

Where the guardrail lives

The key builder question is whether the guardrail is enforced by the broker (server side) or by your agent or MCP client (client side). Client-side approval can be skipped by a different client or a prompt; broker-side approval cannot. Coinbase documents that one client previews and asks before ordering while another orders in one turn, against the same server.⁴

See the approval model comparison.

Sources

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Suggest a correction (opens a GitHub issue)

Footnotes

1. Trading with your agent - Robinhood. Robinhood, official, retrieved 2026-11-12. ↩

2. Onboarding an external agent - Robinhood. Robinhood, official, retrieved 2026-11-12. ↩

3. AI-Powered Portfolio Analysis & Trading Tools (IBKR AI Integrations). Interactive Brokers, official, retrieved 2026-11-12. ↩

4. Coinbase MCP - Coinbase Developer Documentation. Coinbase Developer Platform, official, retrieved 2026-11-12. ↩