Antoine Roney was born April 1, 1963, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, three years after his older brother, trumpeter Wallace Roney, who would go on to become his most frequent employer and closest musical partner. Like Wallace, Antoine trained at Washington, D.C.'s Duke Ellington School of the Arts before continuing his studies at the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford in Connecticut.

His earliest currently documented recording predates his own leader debut and even his brother's first album as a leader: a March 1989 date in Roanne, France, backing veteran drummer Rashied Ali alongside bassist Tyler Mitchell and pianist Greg Murphy. The tapes sat unreleased for two decades, surfacing only in 2009, after Ali's death, as In France on Blue Music Group. Roney's next documented appearance came two years later, on his brother's debut as a leader, Seth Air (Muse Records, 1991), recorded at Van Gelder Studio. He made his own debut as a leader the following year: The Traveler, recorded February 6, 1992, also at Van Gelder, though it wasn't released until 1994, on Muse Records (MCD 5469). Produced by Don Sickler, the quintet date paired Roney's tenor with alto saxophonist and flutist James Spaulding, his brother on trumpet, pianist Jacky Terrasson, bassist Dwayne Burno, and drummer Louis Hayes.

The following year, Roney was paired with another young tenor saxophonist carrying a famous jazz surname: Ravi Coltrane, son of John Coltrane. Billed together as "Grand Central," the two recorded at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley and live at Keystone Korner in Oakland in June 1993; the material was issued in Japan on Alfa Jazz as Sax Storm and later reissued as Tenor Titans, with Jacky Terrasson again on piano. Roney's sophomore leader date, Whirling, followed in 1996 (recorded April 26-27, 1995, at East Side Sound in New York), again on Muse (MCD 5546), this time produced by veteran tenor saxophonist Houston Person and featuring pianist Ronnie Mathews, bassist Santi Debriano, and drummer Nasheet Waits.

Through the late 1990s and 2000s, Roney became a mainstay of his brother's working bands, documented on saxophone or bass clarinet across The Wallace Roney Quintet (1996), Village (1997), No Room For Argument (2000), Prototype (2004), Mystikal (2005), Jazz (2007), and the delayed-release Stand (recorded 2006, issued 2012), often alongside pianist Geri Allen, Wallace's wife from 1995 to 2008. He simultaneously worked as a member of Elvin Jones's Jazz Machine, documented on the live album The Truth: Heard Live at the Blue Note, recorded September 11-12, 1999, and released in 2004 on Half Note Records, sharing the saxophone chair with Michael Brecker alongside trombonist Robin Eubanks, trumpeter Darren Barrett, pianist Carlos McKinney, and bassist Gene Perla. He was also a member of the Jacky Terrasson Quartet and the Ricky Ford Quintet, appearing on Ford's Tenor Madness Too! (Muse, 1995), and turned up on drummer Cindy Blackman's Telepathy (1994).

In 2006, Roney self-released two more albums independent of any label: a duo record with percussionist Daniel Moreno, and Marley Session, a set of Bob Marley covers. That same year he appeared on Cuban-born pianist Aruán Ortiz's Alameda. His most recent documented work brought his career full circle within his own family: two independently released trio albums, Antoine Roney Trio (2018), featuring his son Kojo Odu Roney on drums alongside bassist Malik McLaurine, and the live Antoine Roney Trio: Controlling the Uncontrollable (2021), with Kojo Odu Roney again on drums and Saadi Zain on bass. Kojo Odu Roney also went on to play drums on several tracks of his uncle Wallace's final studio album, Blue Dawn - Blue Nights (2019) - though Antoine himself is not on that record, whose saxophone chair went to Emilio Modeste.

Roney's tenor playing sits squarely in the post-Coltrane lineage that shaped so much hard bop and post-bop saxophone after the mid-1960s, a debt made explicit on Whirling's "The Hymn (To Trane, Michael Smith and Other Prophets)." That lineage was underlined twice over in his career: first in 1993, when he was billed alongside Ravi Coltrane, John Coltrane's son, on a pair of tenor-summit recordings built around exactly that contrast of two young saxophonists working the same tradition from different angles; and again at the end of the 1990s, when he held down a saxophone chair in Elvin Jones's Jazz Machine, playing in the band of Coltrane's own former drummer. As a doubler on soprano saxophone and bass clarinet, Roney also found a natural role inside brother Wallace Roney's more electric, texturally adventurous 2000s working band, where his bass clarinet lines widened the group's palette beyond straight-ahead post-bop. In his most recent work, leading a trio built around his own son, Roney has continued to write and record original material largely outside the conventional label system, self-releasing his output digitally.