THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not, it’s safe to assume, a devoted Polymarket user. If he had been, the Iranian leader might still be alive. Hours before Khamenei’s compound in Tehran was reduced to rubble last week, an account under the username “magamyman” bet about $20,000 that the supreme leader would no longer be in power by the end of March. Polymarket placed the odds at just 14 percent, netting “magamyman” a profit of more than $120,000.Everyone knew that an attack might be in the works—some American aircraft carriers had already been deployed to the Middle East weeks ago—but the Iranian government was caught off guard by the timing. Although the ayatollah surely was aware of the risks to his life, he presumably did not know that he would be targeted on this particular Saturday morning. Yet on Polymarket, plenty of warning signs pointed to an impending attack. The day before, 150 users bet at least $1,000 that the United States would strike Iran within the next 24 hours, according to a New York Times analysis. Until then, few people on the platform were betting that kind of money on an immediate attack.Maybe all of this sounds eerily familiar. In January, someone on Polymarket made a series of suspiciously well-timed bets right before the U.S. attacked a foreign country and deposed its leader. By the time Nicolás Maduro was extracted from Venezuela and flown to New York, the user had pocketed more than $400,000. Perhaps this trader and the Iran bettors who are now flush with cash simply had the luck of a lifetime—the gambling equivalent of making a half-court shot. Or maybe they knew what was happening ahead of time and flipped it for easy money. We simply do not know.Polymarket traders swap crypto, not cash, and conceal their identities through the blockchain. Even so, investigations into insider trading are already underway: Last month, Israel charged a military reservist for allegedly using classified information to make unspecified bets on Polymarket.The platform forbids illegal activity, which includes insider trading in the U.S. But with a few taps on a smartphone, anyone with privileged knowledge can now make a quick buck (or a hundred thousand). Polymarket and other prediction markets—the sanitized, industry-favored term for sites that let you wager on just about anything—have been dogged by accusations of insider trading in markets of all flavors. How did a Polymarket user know that… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Outside OpenAI’s headquarters, a handful of people gathered on Monday holding pieces of colorful chalk. They got down on their knees and started writing messages on the sidewalk. Stand for liberty. Please no legal mass surveillance. Change the contract please.At issue was a business deal that the company recently signed with the Department of Defense, following the Pentagon’s sudden turn against Anthropic. OpenAI will now supply its technology to the military for use in classified settings, the sorts that may involve wartime decisions and intelligence-gathering—an agreement, many legal experts told me, that could give the government wide-ranging powers. “I would just really like to see OpenAI do the right thing and stand up for something, anything,” Niki Dupuis, an AI-start-up founder and one of the chalk protesters, told me.In a widely leaked internal memo that Sam Altman sent last Thursday night, a copy of which I obtained, the OpenAI CEO said that he would seek “red lines” to prevent the Pentagon from using OpenAI products for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons. These were ostensibly the very same limits that Anthropic had demanded and that had infuriated the Pentagon, leading Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to declare the company a supply-chain risk—a hefty sanction that would require anybody who sells to the Pentagon to stop using Anthropic products in their work with the military. Perhaps OpenAI was about to secure the very terms Anthropic had been denied.But a close reading of the contract—the portions of it that OpenAI has shared with the public, anyway—indicates that the lines are, in fact, blurry. Several independent legal experts told me that, legally, the Pentagon can likely get away with using OpenAI’s technology—versions of the models that underlie ChatGPT—for mass surveillance of Americans. Moreover, the military will likely have a pathway to use OpenAI’s technology in autonomous weapons. AI models from Anthropic, DOD’s previous partner, have likely already been used for warfare; recently, its products were reportedly used to identify targets in Iran (Anthropic declined to comment on that reporting). But the company had refused to allow its technology to be used in fully autonomous weapons.[Read: Inside Anthropic’s killer-robot dispute with the Pentagon]The Department of Defense, which the Trump administration refers to as the Department of War, declined to answer my questions about the contract. A spokesperson for OpenAI reiterated to me that the Pentagon has agreed to not use the firm’s AI system… [TheTopNews] Read More.

A few hours before Donald Trump gave his State of the Union address, Republican sources told the PBS correspondent Lisa Desjardins that the speech would break records. The president would speak for more than two hours, she reported on X, and one reliable source claimed he might ramble on for 180 minutes.The post went viral. At about the same time, the market started to move on Kalshi, an online platform where people can invest money in the outcome of a given news event. (Don’t call it gambling.) Forecasts on “How long will Trump speak for at the State of the Union?” shot up by 10 minutes after Desjardins posted: Armed with what they perceived as insider information, users thought they could make a buck by accurately “predicting” the outcome of his speech.But others speculated in a different direction. “They’re leaking a bunch of stuff about a super long speech and he’ll go about 2 minutes short of the supposed mark and everyone in the white house will make $200k on it,” one Bluesky user, ‪@danvogfan, posted a few hours after Desjardin’s post went viral. In other words, maybe the sources really did have good information—but they were throwing others off track to manipulate the market and profit for themselves.Prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket have ushered in a moment when anyone with access to exclusive information related to a major news event can do this, even as the platforms themselves prohibit market manipulation. Trump ultimately didn’t speak for as long as the sources had said: He ended after an hour and 47 minutes. Anyone who had bet according to the information that Desjardins had reported would have lost money. “We live in such a profound dystopia,” another popular Bluesky user wrote above @danvogfan’s post after the fact.[Read: America is slow-walking into a Polymarket disaster]We can’t say definitively that any insider trading has actually happened, though other suspicious incidents have occurred. In early January, one Polymarket user bet more than $30,000 on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro being ousted just hours before he was captured by the U.S. military. (The bet paid out $400,000 and led Representative Ritchie Torres to introduce a bill that would ban federal workers from using prediction markets.) Last month, Israeli authorities charged two people on suspicion of using classified information to bet on military operations on Polymarket. And this past weekend, an anonymous trader who goes… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Elon Musk’s vision for the future of Tesla has finally rolled off the assembly line. Last month, a Tesla factory in Texas built the first Cybercab, a driverless electric car with neither a steering wheel nor pedals. With typical bombast, Musk has promised that the Cybercab will cost less than $30,000 by next year, and said that it could perhaps even pay for itself: Owners will conceivably be able to nap at home while the car is out hailing riders and earning them money.The Cybercab is among the splashiest parts of Tesla’s pivot away from its core business of selling cars (or at least those driven by humans). Musk is dead set on turning Tesla into a company that makes robots and robotaxis. Earlier this year, he killed the Model S—the vehicle that initially made Tesla into an electric-car giant—freeing up factory space to manufacture Optimus, a humanoid robot he says has the potential to be the “biggest product of all time.” The world’s richest man has a lot riding on the success of Tesla’s robots and robotaxis, namely a pay package worth up to $1 trillion.So far, the transformation has been chaotic. For all the hype surrounding the Cybercab, it’s not clear that Tesla can legally sell a car without a steering wheel. The technology also remains unproven: Tesla operates a fleet of robotaxis in Austin, where they have crashed at roughly eight times the rate of American drivers, according to an analysis of Tesla’s self-reported crash data. Musk has even further to go with his Optimus robots. The program has been dogged by public embarrassments and failures: At a Tesla event in December, an Optimus robot tasked with handing out water to guests lost its balance and dramatically tumbled backwards. Meanwhile, Tesla’s car sales are tumbling as Musk has seemingly lost interest in making human-driven cars. Besides the Cybertruck, which has proved to be a flop, Tesla has not released an entirely new car model since 2020. (Tesla and Musk did not respond to my requests for comment.)Tesla is undergoing a transformation—just not one oriented around the Cybercab or an army of humanoids that will do the dishes. The product that is poised to define the near future of the company is a metal box the size of a shipping container. It’s the Tesla Megapack, an enormous rechargeable battery that is used by power plants to balance out… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Dean Ball helped devise much of the Trump administration’s AI policy. Now he cannot believe what the Department of Defense has done to one of its major technology partners, the AI firm Anthropic.After weeks of negotiations, the Pentagon was unable to force Anthropic to accede to terms that, in Anthropic’s telling, could involve using AI for autonomous weapons and the mass surveillance of Americans, as my colleague Ross Andersen reported over the weekend. So the government has labeled the company a supply-chain risk, effectively plastering it with a scarlet letter. The Pentagon says that this means Anthropic will be unable to work with any company that contracts with the administration. That could include major technology companies that provide infrastructure for Anthropic’s AI models, such as Amazon. The supply-chain-risk designation is normally reserved for companies run by foreign adversaries, and if the order holds up legally, it could be a death blow for Anthropic.[Read: Inside Anthropic’s killer-robot dispute with the Pentagon]Ball, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, was traveling in Europe as all of this was unfolding last week, staying up as late as 2 a.m. to urge people in the administration to take a less severe approach: simply canceling the contract with Anthropic, without the supply-chain-risk designation. When his efforts failed, Ball told me in an interview yesterday, “my reaction was shock, and sadness, and anger.”In the aftermath of the decision, Ball published an essay on his Substack casting the conflict in civilizational terms; the Pentagon’s ultimatum, in his reckoning, is “a kind of death rattle of the old republic, the outward expression of a body that has thrown in the towel.” The action, he wrote, is a repudiation of private property and freedom of speech, two of the most fundamental principles of the United States. In today’s America, Ball argued, the executive branch has become so unstoppable—and passing laws has become so challenging—that the president and his officials can do whatever they want. (When reached for comment, a White House spokesperson told me in a statement that “no company has the right to interfere in key national security decision-making.”)Yesterday, I called Ball to discuss his essay and why the standoff with Anthropic feels, to him, like such a dire sign for America. Ball is far from a likely source of such harsh criticism: He’s a Republican with close ties to the Trump administration who departed… [TheTopNews] Read More.