Alpaca Claude Connectors: What Paper and Live Can and Cannot Do

As of November 12, 2026, Alpaca lists two connectors in Claude's connector directory, and they do different jobs. The Alpaca Paper Trading connector lets Claude read a paper account and place simulated orders in stocks, ETFs and options. The Alpaca Live connector lets Claude read a real account, research the market and manage watchlists, and Alpaca's own announcement says it "does not place orders." So no real-money order leaves Claude through either connector. The routes that can send one, Alpaca's open-source MCP server and a gateway such as Composio, are a different setup with different risks, and this page puts all four side by side (Alpaca's announcement).

We read Alpaca's post, its MCP server documentation, the server's GitHub page, Composio's setup page and Anthropic's connector guide on the day the connectors went up, and we have built and tested an Alpaca OAuth connection of our own since August 2026, so one section below is about what that taught us. Nothing here is a prediction or a recommendation; it is what the products do.

The two connectors side by side

The paper connector is the one that trades, and only in simulation. Alpaca describes it as letting you "analyze market trends, monitor your account, and place simulated trades across stocks, ETFs, and options using natural language." The live connector reads: balances, positions, activity, market research, watchlists. Alpaca's comparison table marks even simulated orders as unsupported on it, and the sentence is unambiguous: "The Alpaca Live connector does not place orders." Live execution, the page says, goes through Alpaca's Trading API or its dashboard (announcement).

Options need the asset class turned on at Alpaca: "Options data will only appear for accounts with those asset classes enabled." Crypto is not part of either connector's description; it shows up on Alpaca's page only in the standard disclosures about Alpaca Crypto LLC. If you want an AI assistant on a crypto account, the open-source MCP server has crypto order and data tools and the connectors do not.

What a paper fill does not tell you

Alpaca is unusually direct about this, and it is worth repeating because a chat window makes a paper fill feel like a real one. "Paper trading uses simulated funds with no real capital," the page says, and the simulation leaves out "market impact, latency-related slippage, order queue position, and regulatory fees." A completed paper order "does not predict a live fill." An order placed through the connector may also stay open, partially fill or be rejected, so Alpaca tells you to read the status the connector returns rather than assume the trade happened (announcement).

Our Alpaca paper trading guide goes through what paper is good for and where it misleads, and the Alpaca order rules page has the order types, fractional rules, bracket rules and time-in-force rules that apply the same way to a paper order placed from Claude as to one placed from code.

Data: what Claude sees depends on your Alpaca data plan

The connectors read Alpaca's market data through your account, so what Claude can see is what your data plan allows: "Free and paid plans differ in feed coverage, data recency, and request limits." Alpaca's data page lists two plans on November 12, 2026.

On the free plan a quote Claude reports comes from IEX alone, a single exchange, so the last price it shows can differ from the consolidated tape. That is a known free-tier limit, not a connector flaw, but it matters when you ask an assistant whether a paper fill was "good." The fill came from Alpaca's simulator; the price you compared it against came from one venue.

How to connect it, and the checks Alpaca and Anthropic ask for

Alpaca's steps are short. Open the Alpaca Paper Trading connector in Claude's directory, complete the Alpaca sign-in and authorization flow, and, before you authorize, "review the requested permissions and confirm you are connecting the intended paper account." Then verify the connection by asking Claude for the paper account's balance and status and comparing the answer with your Alpaca dashboard. The Live connector is the same flow against the live account (announcement).

On the Claude side, Anthropic's guide says connectors are available on the Free, Pro, Max, Ultra, Team and Enterprise plans, with Free limited to one custom connector, and that they work on claude.ai, Claude Desktop, Cowork and the mobile apps. Individual users add them under Customize, then Connectors; on Team and Enterprise plans an Owner adds them in organization settings first. A connector is switched on per conversation, from the plus button, then Connectors, so a chat where you forgot to enable it will simply not have the tools.

Anthropic's own security lines are the ones to keep in mind with a brokerage account on the other end, even a paper one:

• "Only connect Claude to servers built and hosted by organizations and applications you trust."
• "Malicious MCP servers may include hidden instructions that try to make Claude perform unintended actions." That is prompt injection, and it is why a tool that can place orders deserves a confirmation step every time.
• Review each tool request, and "only click 'Allow always' when using a server and tool that you trust to run unsupervised."
• During Research, disable tools that can take write actions in external applications.

Alpaca's MCP documentation adds two lines of its own that apply to the connectors just as well: orders run directly against the Trading API, so an order the assistant suggests should be reviewed before it is confirmed, and "Insights generated by our MCP server and connected AI agents are for educational and informational purposes only" (MCP docs).

Why the live connector does not place orders

Alpaca does not say. The page describes the Live connector's purpose, "portfolio monitoring, market research," and states the limit, and that is all. What we can report is the company the decision keeps. Robinhood's agentic accounts let an assistant propose an order that the customer confirms in the app, which we covered in our Robinhood agentic trading page; Webull's cloud MCP server queues order instructions for confirmation in the Webull app; Alpaca's own open-source server places orders directly but defaults to paper and ships with a warning about keys. Three brokers, three answers, and none of them is "an assistant sends real orders on its own from a hosted chat."

Our reading, for what it is worth, is the plain one. A connector is a chat window. It has no standing rule about position size, daily loss or exit, no circuit breaker and no record beyond the conversation, and every order is a person typing a sentence. Keeping real orders out of the hosted connector keeps the person in the loop by construction. It also keeps the broker out of a question it would rather not answer: what happens when the assistant misreads a sentence and the order is real.

One authorization can cover both accounts

Here is the part from our own integration work. When we built JorgAI's Alpaca OAuth connection in August 2026, the first thing we learned was that Alpaca's authorization page grants an app access to both the live and the paper account under one approval. Which account the app then talks to is the app's decision, not something the authorization screen settles, unless the app asks. We had to make that choice explicit on our side, and we default to the real account unless a member asks for paper on that specific connection, because the alternative, an app that quietly talks to the paper account while the member thinks it is live, or the reverse, is worse than any wording problem.

Alpaca's two connectors make the split explicit at the directory level, which is the right design: you pick Paper or Live before you sign in. It still pays to follow Alpaca's third step and ask Claude for the balance after connecting. A paper account that was funded with the default $100,000 of simulated cash looks nothing like a real balance, and the number tells you in one line which account you authorized. If you are the kind of person who keeps API keys around, the same discipline applies to them: our page on giving a bot your keys covers what a key can and cannot do at each venue.

The other ways Claude reaches an Alpaca account

The open-source server is the only route on the table that places real orders. It runs on your laptop next to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor or VS Code, reads your API keys from the client's configuration, and flips from paper to live with one environment variable. Its GitHub page says plainly that the server can place real trades and reach your portfolio, so the API keys are to be treated as sensitive credentials, and that its HTTP mode has no built-in authentication, which is why the warning about the public internet is there (GitHub). Composio sits in between: a hosted gateway that holds the Alpaca connection for you and exposes about a hundred tools, with bulk cancel and bulk liquidate among them and no statement on its page about live versus paper (Composio). We walk through each of those two in our page on trading a live Alpaca account from Claude; the costs of running the chat route for a month, against a hosted platform, are already in our MCP trading bot comparison.

Where JorgAI fits

JorgAI is software that runs the rules you set inside your own brokerage account, and Alpaca is one of the brokers it connects to today for stocks and ETFs. The difference from a connector is not intelligence; it is standing. A rule about position size, a daily spend cap, a stop and a profit target, and a log of every order and every skipped candidate run whether or not a chat window is open, and nothing trades because of a sentence typed at 11 PM. The no-code Alpaca automation page shows the setup, and the best AI trading bot for Alpaca page is our honest map of the field, connectors included. The measured version of that difference, what a connector does against what a rules engine declines, is in our connector versus auto-trader comparison.

If you want to see rules-based automation with your own limits run in a simulator before you connect any broker, start on the free plan. There is a $100,000 demo account inside that needs no broker at all, and the auto-trader's settings glossary explains every cap before you turn one on. When you are ready for a real account, connect your broker and the same rules run there.

Quick answers

Can Claude trade my real Alpaca account?

Not through Alpaca's connectors. The Paper Trading connector places simulated orders in a paper account; the Live connector reads a real account and "does not place orders." Real orders from Claude need Alpaca's open-source MCP server running on your own machine with live keys, or a third-party gateway.

Is the Alpaca Claude connector free?

Alpaca lists no price for the connectors. What you pay for is data: the free plan gives IEX quotes with 200 API calls a minute, and Algo Trader Plus is $99 a month for all US exchanges and real-time options data. Claude's connector feature is available on its Free plan with one custom connector, and on Pro, Max, Ultra, Team and Enterprise.

Does the connector support options and crypto?

Options, yes, in the Paper Trading connector, as long as the asset class is enabled on your Alpaca account. Crypto is not part of either connector's description; the open-source MCP server covers it.

Does the Paper Trading connector ever place a real trade?

No. It reaches the paper account only, and a paper fill "does not predict a live fill." If you also authorize the Live connector, confirm which one a conversation is using before you ask for an order.

Which is safer, the connector or the MCP server?

The hosted connectors cannot send a real order, so the worst case is a wrong paper trade or a wrong watchlist. The open-source server can send real orders and holds your live keys on your machine, which is why Alpaca and Anthropic both tell you to review every order and never run it where strangers can reach it.

How we put this together. Every quoted line comes from Alpaca's connector announcement, Alpaca's MCP server documentation, the alpaca-mcp-server GitHub page, Composio's Alpaca-to-Claude page and Anthropic's custom connectors article, all read on November 12, 2026, the day the connectors were announced, plus Alpaca's market data page for the plan table. The section on authorization comes from building and testing JorgAI's own Alpaca OAuth connection in August 2026. Alpaca changes its products often; when a line above stops matching its pages, the pages win.

JorgAI is software that carries out the rules you set in your own brokerage account. It is not investment advice and does not predict or promise results. Trading involves risk of loss. Alpaca is a trademark of its owner, and Claude is a trademark of Anthropic; JorgAI is not affiliated with or endorsed by either.