Interactive Brokers Says Its AI Trading Tool Went Viral Before It Was Even Announced

Interactive Brokers CEO Milan Galik disclosed on the company's Q2 2026 earnings call on July 21, 2026 that clients were connecting AI chatbots to their IBKR accounts before the company made any public announcement about the capability. 

"Surprisingly to us, we saw a lot of clients connecting their AI chatbots to their IBKR accounts before we even made any public announcements," Galik said. "We are very visible in the drop-downs of the AI chatbots as one of the companies that you can connect the chatbot to."

The feature behind that organic adoption is IBKR Connector, an enterprise-level integration with OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI that allows clients to connect their AI chatbot directly to their brokerage account. 

Through the integration, a client can tell the AI what they want to accomplish like analyzing their portfolio, researching opportunities, or planning a trade, and the AI will suggest appropriate strategies and prepare orders for stocks, options, and futures across global markets, according to the press release. 

Galik described the launch as "off to a strong start" and said it "further expands our AI integration capabilities."

Human in the Middle, and What Comes After

The current design keeps a human in the loop at the point of execution. When an AI chatbot prepares a trade instruction through IBKR Connector, that instruction appears in a designated area of the client's UI where it must be manually approved before becoming an executable order. 

Galik explained the reasoning: the people connecting AI chatbots to their brokerage accounts are general public users, not the technically sophisticated clients who have long used IBKR's APIs to automate trading. That distinction requires a different level of protection.

"We have to be more careful so that the chatbot doesn't run away from them and generate a lot of bad trades," Galik said. "That is why we have elected the approach of having the human-in-the-middle."

But Galik confirmed that this is a staged approach rather than a permanent design. "We are going to be offering, at some point, fully autonomous agentic trading," he said. "We're going to be very careful about the type of guardrails that will be available for our clients. We will submit them to some type of a test to ensure that they understand the benefits and dangers of the autonomous trading before we let them proceed autonomously."

The disclosure places Interactive Brokers in the middle of the spectrum that the six-brokerage AI trading landscape has established this quarter, currently operating a human-in-the-loop model while explicitly planning to move toward full autonomy, with a client qualification test as the stated safeguard before that transition occurs.

Internally, AI is also expanding across client service, compliance, surveillance, and new account onboarding, according to the press release. The prepared remarks described AI as the tool helping Interactive Brokers scale its operations as the pace of new client additions accelerates, 5.19 million total customer accounts at quarter end, up 34% year over year, with pre-tax profit margin at 77% for the seventh consecutive quarter above 70%.