Public AI Agents

Public AI Agents is an artificial-intelligence feature for self-directed investing offered by Public Holdings, Inc. under the name Agentic Brokerage. A user describes a recurring or conditional account action in natural language, reviews a proposed workflow, and activates it. After activation, the workflow can monitor conditions and submit transactions without asking the user to approve each individual execution. Securities activity is handled through Open to the Public Investing, Inc., while cryptocurrency activity is handled through Zero Hash LLC.^[2][9][10]

Public announced the product in November 2025 and began a preview rollout in March 2026. On August 17, 2026, the company announced a marketplace for sharing, deploying, and modifying agents and said that the product was available without a waitlist on mobile and the web.^[1][3][5] That rollout statement had not yet been reflected consistently across Public's documentation by August 19. A June support article still described a waitlist and web-only workflows, even though the live product page had been updated with a marketplace and a "Get started" link. The no-waitlist and mobile-availability statements therefore remained Public's rollout claims rather than an independent account-by-account access audit.^[1][2][6]

Public calls itself the first agentic brokerage and called its sharing catalog the first marketplace of portfolio agents. Those priority claims are company marketing and have not been independently established. The product is one implementation of AI agents in finance, not a general-purpose trading model or an investment adviser.^[1][2][9]

Product design

The product separates workflow construction from execution. In the construction phase, a conversational interface interprets the user's prompt, asks for missing details, and produces a preview with a title, description, conditions, and actions. Public requires the user to review and confirm that preview before activation. Its agreement says that securities instructions are then transmitted to Public Investing and cryptocurrency instructions to Zero Hash.^[7][9]

Public's support documentation makes an important distinction about determinism. It says the conversation used to build a plan is not deterministic, but that an approved workflow follows the same plan each time and does not improvise. Public's description therefore portrays large language model technology as an intent-to-workflow interface around a constrained runner, rather than as an unconstrained model decision at every execution. The cited public materials do not identify the model, system prompts, workflow schema, validation logic, or runner source, so that boundary cannot be independently inspected.^[3][6][9]

The approval step is a form of human-in-the-loop control at configuration time, not at transaction time. Once an agent is active, the agreement says Public does not provide advance notice of every pending transaction and does not wait for another confirmation before execution. A completed transaction cannot be cancelled or reversed. Public says users can edit, pause, or terminate an agent and receive transaction or error notifications, but the user remains responsible for monitoring its operation.^[7][9]

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Supported actions

Public describes agents as able to place, edit, and cancel orders for stocks, options, and cryptocurrencies; respond to price moves and technical indicators; react to portfolio events such as dividends, interest, assignment, expiration, or exercise; move money; manage watchlists; and send alerts.^[3][7] The launch changelog documents a narrower initial set and then publisher-reported additions, including multi-leg options, order-event triggers, account-history context, external deposits, paused workflow states, and workflow editing.^[3]

These lists describe supported interfaces, not a performance guarantee. The terms say execution at a particular time or price is not guaranteed. Public also warns that a condition can depend on third-party market data that may be delayed, interrupted, incomplete, or wrong, and that such a failure can trigger a transaction incorrectly, prevent a trigger, or cause improper execution.^[9][10]

Ordinary account rules remain in force. Public's support pages say an agent checks buying power and respects product enrollment, options approval, account type, and trading-session restrictions. If an account lacks sufficient funds, the documented behavior is to skip that run, notify the user, and try again when the condition next occurs while the agent remains active.^[18]

Development and release history

Axios reported on November 17, 2025, that Public planned an AI-powered brokerage for researching, constructing, and managing portfolios. The report attributed the product strategy to Public and noted the regulatory question created when automated tools approach investment advice. It did not test a released agent.^[5]

Public's changelog dates Preview 1.0.1 to March 30, 2026. The initial release supported market monitoring, selected technical indicators, real-time data in conversation, equities, cryptocurrency, single-leg options, cash movement, and notifications. A Public press release the next day described a phased rollout rather than immediate access for every account.^[3][4]

Subsequent preview notes recorded multi-leg and rolling options on April 3, order-event reactions on April 17, account-history access on April 30, pause-and-resume behavior on May 8, and builder and reliability changes through May 20. These are Public's release notes, not independently reproduced tests. They also show that the feature set and runner behavior changed during the preview.^[3]

Public added an integrated research interface in July. The company said it could answer questions about a user's holdings and draw on historical earnings, financial statements, price information, and real-time market data.^[12] The accompanying legal supplement is more qualified: it calls the generative and agentic technology experimental, says output can contain material inaccuracies or be incomplete or outdated, and requires independent human evaluation rather than reliance as financial or professional advice.^[11]

Marketplace and sharing

On August 17, Public said it had launched a marketplace of portfolio agents. According to the announcement, a user could deploy an agent immediately, customize it, or share a created agent for another user to run or modify in that user's account. The same announcement said the waitlist had ended and agents were live for everyone on mobile and the web.^[1]

Sharing was not entirely new. Public's June FAQ already documented a share control, and its agreement allowed agents and other content to be published through Public, social platforms, or public links. The agreement says Public does not guarantee, pre-screen, supervise, or endorse published content and may remove it or disable sharing. The August announcement is therefore evidence of a marketplace presentation and expanded rollout, not evidence that Public independently validated the quality or suitability of each shared strategy.^[1][8][9]

Public's contemporaneous documentation did not present one consistent availability state. On August 19, the June basics page still said accounts were being admitted from a waitlist and that workflows were web-only. The live landing page, by contrast, showed the marketplace and a "Get started" link. The stale support text and newer product page establish a documentation transition, but neither is an independent account-by-account test of the availability announced on August 17.^[1][2][6]

Pricing and access limits

The June support page says Agents do not require Public Premium and that standard account and trading fees apply to actions an agent performs. It also says there was no stated limit on the number of agents a user could hold. Backtesting was not available; users could inspect a plan before activation and review logged runs afterward.^[8]

The absence of a separate subscription does not make trading costless. Brokerage, options, cryptocurrency, transfer, margin, and other account terms continue to apply according to the relevant transaction and account. Public's agreement also limits the service to personal, non-commercial use and prohibits using its output to provide investment advice or compensated recommendations to other people.^[9]

Legal and operational boundaries

Public structures Agentic Brokerage as a self-directed tool. Its agreement and disclosure say the product does not provide investment advice, recommendations, or endorsements; does not account for a user's goals or risk tolerance when generating output; and leaves suitability and due diligence to the user. This is Public's contractual position. It does not determine how every future feature or interaction would be classified by a regulator or court.^[9][10]

The product involves three named service roles. Public Holdings offers the conversational service. Public Investing, a registered broker-dealer and FINRA member, receives securities and brokerage-account instructions for execution. Zero Hash receives cryptocurrency instructions for execution and provides cryptocurrency account services. The product's AI component is not described as a broker-dealer, and the agreement does not guarantee its output or any particular execution result.^{[2][9][10][19]}

Public also offers a separate hosted Model Context Protocol server. That product lets a user connect a third-party AI provider to a Public account, and Public warns that account data then leaves its environment for the provider's infrastructure. Public presents its in-app Agents as a separate feature that does not require a user to connect an outside platform or generate API keys. The products may both lead to brokerage actions, but they differ in whether the user connects an external AI provider, their disclosed data paths and supervision boundaries, and which product disclosures apply.^{[2][6][13][17]}

Risk and evidence limits

Public's own terms identify several failure paths. Generated output may be inaccurate or stale. A workflow may misunderstand the user's intent before activation. Third-party data may be late or wrong. A correct trigger can still encounter execution delay or an unavailable price. Because active agents can transact without renewed confirmation, configuration and data errors can have financial effects before a user intervenes.^[9][10]

FINRA's 2026 oversight report discusses AI agents generally and identifies autonomy, scope and authority, auditability and transparency, data sensitivity, domain knowledge, hallucinations, human-in-the-loop oversight, and guardrails as concerns for member firms. The report is regulatory guidance, not an evaluation or approval of Public's product. A June 2026 congressional request for information likewise asked about agentic trading and retail brokerage safeguards but did not make findings about Public AI Agents.^[14][16]

Academic evidence about language-model trading agents remained difficult to compare. A 2026 audit-oriented preprint included 77 studies and found that only 19 met its minimum closed-loop evaluation boundary. Of those 19, two reported extractable time-consistent split protocols, one reported an explicit transaction-cost model, one documented universe or survivorship handling, and none reached the survey's R3 reproducibility level. The preprint did not evaluate Public AI Agents, but it limits any attempt to infer real-world reliability from the wider research literature.^[15]

As of August 19, the cited public evidence contained no product-specific independent evaluation of transaction accuracy, trigger reliability, user outcomes, loss rates, security testing, prompt-injection resistance, or marketplace-strategy quality. The cited Public materials did not disclose the model identity, training data, full system architecture, or an external audit of the runner. The available evidence establishes a real brokerage feature, a formal execution and responsibility structure, and an evolving preview. It does not establish that agent-created strategies outperform manual trading or that automated execution reduces investment risk.^{[3][9][14][15]}

References

1. ^Public. "New updates to AI Agents on Public." X, August 17, 2026. x.com/...2089382171291070550
2. ^Public. "AI Agents for Investing." Accessed August 19, 2026. public.com/ai-agents
3. ^Public. "AI Agents Change Log." Accessed August 19, 2026. public.com/...change-log
4. ^Public. "Public Becomes the First Brokerage To Introduce AI Agents for Your Portfolio." PR Newswire, March 31, 2026. prnewswire.com/...nts-for-your-portfolio-302729050
5. ^Lucinda Shen. "Exclusive: Public launches AI-powered brokerage." Axios, November 17, 2025. axios.com/...ai-stock-market-public
6. ^Public. "Agents: The Basics." June 9, 2026. help.public.com/...15435640-agents-the-basics
7. ^Public. "Agents: Setting Up and Controlling Agents." June 9, 2026. help.public.com/...tting-up-and-controlling-agents
8. ^Public. "Agents: Sharing, Pricing, and Limits." June 9, 2026. help.public.com/...ents-sharing-pricing-and-limits
9. ^Public. "Agentic Brokerage Agreement." Accessed August 19, 2026. public.com/...agenticterms
10. ^Public. "Agentic Brokerage Disclosure." Accessed August 19, 2026. public.com/...agenticdisclosures
11. ^Public. "Agentic Brokerage Research Supplement." Accessed August 19, 2026. public.com/...agenticresearch
12. ^Public. "Research." July 30, 2026. public.com/...research
13. ^Public. "Public MCP Server for trading on AI platforms." Accessed August 19, 2026. public.com/mcp-trading
14. ^FINRA. "2026 FINRA Annual Regulatory Oversight Report." December 2025. finra.org/...nnual-regulatory-oversight-report.pdf
15. ^Yihan Xia et al. "Agentic Trading: When LLM Agents Meet Financial Markets." arXiv:2605.19337, May 2026. arxiv.org/...2605.19337
16. ^Bill Foster et al. "Request for Information on Agentic Trading." June 23, 2026. foster.house.gov/...-agentic-trading-6.23.2026.pdf
17. ^Jessica Inskip. "Public.com Review." StockBrokers.com, July 31, 2026. stockbrokers.com/...public-com
18. ^Public. "Agents: Money, Risk, and Rules." June 9, 2026. help.public.com/...718-agents-money-risk-and-rules
19. ^FINRA. "BrokerCheck Report: Open to the Public Investing, Inc., CRD 127818." Accessed August 19, 2026. files.brokercheck.finra.org/...firm_127818.pdf