US brokerage Charles Schwab announced its AI connection in a press release on 12 November. The company had $13.33 trillion in client assets in the third quarter, the release said.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open protocol that lets an AI application retrieve information from an external service and use its functions. An MCP server is a program on the service’s side that provides this information and these functions. Clients connect their own large language models to Schwab’s server.

What the AI can do in an account

Once clients have given permission, their AI can retrieve market data and research, analyse the performance of their investments, summarise their portfolio, create alerts and organise investment information, Schwab said.

The AI can prepare, place and manage trades only if the account is thinkorswim-enabled. thinkorswim is Schwab’s suite of trading platforms, with desktop, web and mobile versions.

Schwab said the client stays involved in all of this (‘client in-the-loop’). The release does not say what this involvement means in practice. FinanceX Magazine interprets it as meaning that the client approves every action the AI takes. The magazine said the server has its own authentication and account-identifier controls. Schwab’s release does not contain this information.

The magazine compares the service with Robinhood’s Agentic Trading, which Robinhood launched in beta on 27 May 2026. In that service, agents from Anthropic and OpenAI trade equities autonomously in a separate, separately funded account. FinanceX said independent developers had already published unofficial MCP connections to Schwab accounts.

Options trading before the market opens and after it closes

In the same release, Schwab said clients can now also trade options on about 30 stocks, ETFs and indices on Cboe Options Exchange during extended hours. On weekdays, the morning session runs from 7.30 to 9.25 and the evening session from 16.00 to 16.15 New York time. The release warns that extended-hours trading carries risks, such as lower liquidity, greater price volatility and wider spreads between bid and ask prices.

thinkorswim will also soon get an assistant, thinkorswim Assistant, which will answer plain-language questions about using the platform. AI-based portfolio analyses now cover more stocks and ETFs than before.

The MCP server is in a pilot open to a select group of clients using Claude. Over the coming months, Schwab plans to open access to more clients and support other AI platforms. The release states that Anthropic is not part of the Schwab group. Schwab’s website says thinkorswim is free for its clients, but standard pricing applies to trades, for example $0.65 per options contract.