When Alpaca CEO Yoshi Yokokawa talks about AI agents trading stocks, he’s not pitching some distant future. He’s describing what’s already happening on his platform right now.
Monthly active API users on Alpaca’s trading infrastructure have grown nearly 4x over the past six months.
The numbers behind the agent boom
The acceleration started becoming visible in Q1 2026, when Alpaca’s API usage surged nearly 4x quarter-over-quarter. Monthly growth rates jumped from single digits in Q4 2025 to approximately 30% in early 2026.
The catalyst? AI agents. Alpaca has been building the tools to make this possible. The company launched and enhanced several AI-native products, including a Trading MCP Server, a command-line interface, and an open-source Skills Library.
