OpenAI terminated an employee for using confidential company information to trade on external prediction markets like Polymarket. An analysis by Unusual Whales identified clusters of suspicious trading activity, involving 77 positions across 60 wallets, that aligned with key OpenAI events such as product launches and CEO Sam Altman's temporary ouster.
The main topics covered are the employee termination for insider trading, the evidence of broader suspicious trading patterns on prediction markets linked to confidential information, and the growing regulatory concerns around insider trading within the prediction market industry.
OpenAI has fired an employee following an investigation into their activity on prediction market platforms including Polymarket, WIRED has learned.
OpenAI CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, disclosed the termination in an internal message to employees earlier this year. The employee, she said, “used confidential OpenAI information in connection with external prediction markets (e.g. Polymarket).”
“Our policies prohibit employees from using confidential OpenAI information for personal gain, including in prediction markets,” says spokesperson Kayla Wood. OpenAI has not revealed the name of the employee or the specifics of their trades.
Evidence suggests that this was not an isolated event. Polymarket runs on the Polygon blockchain network, so its trading ledger is pseudonymous but traceable. According to an analysis by the financial data platform Unusual Whales, there have been clusters of activities, which the service flagged as suspicious, around OpenAI-themed events since March 2023.
Unusual Whales flagged 77 positions in 60 wallet addresses as suspected insider trades, looking at the age of the account, trading history, and significance of investment, among other factors. Suspicious trades hinged on the release dates of products like Sora, GPT-5, and the ChatGPT Browser, as well as CEO Sam Altman’s employment status. In November 2023, two days after Altman was dramatically ousted from the company, a new wallet placed a significant bet that he would return, netting over $16,000 in profits. The account never placed another bet.
The behavior fits into patterns typical of insider trades. “The tell is the clustering. In the 40 hours before OpenAI launched its browser, 13 brand-new wallets with zero trading history appeared on the site for the first time to collectively bet $309,486 on the right outcome,” says Unusual Whales CEO Matt Saincome. “When you see that many fresh wallets making the same bet at the same time, it raises a real question about whether the secret is getting out.”
Prediction markets have exploded in popularity in recent years. These platforms allow customers to buy “event contracts” on the outcomes of future events ranging from the winner of the Super Bowl to the daily price of Bitcoin to whether the United States will go to war with Iran. There are a wide array of markets tied to events in the technology sector; you can trade on what Nvidia’s quarterly earnings will be, or when Tesla will launch a new car, or which AI companies will IPO in 2026.
As the platforms have grown, so have concerns that they allow traders to profit from insider knowledge. “This prediction market world makes the Wild West look tame in comparison,” says Jeff Edelstein, a senior analyst at the betting news site InGame. “If there's a market that exists where the answer is known, somebody's going to trade on it.”
Earlier this week, Kalshi announced that it had reported several suspicious insider trading cases to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the government agency overseeing these markets. In one instance, an employee of the popular YouTuber Mr. Beast was suspended for two years and fined $20,000 for making trades related to the streamer’s activities; in another, the far-right political candidate Kyle Langford was banned from the platform for making a trade on his own campaign. The company also announced a number of initiatives to prevent insider trading and market manipulation.
While Kalshi has heavily promoted its crackdown on insider trading, Polymarket has stayed silent on the matter. The company did not return requests for comments.
In the past, major trades on technology-themed markets have sparked speculation that there are Big Tech employees profiting by using their insider knowledge to gain an edge. One notorious example is the so-called “Google whale,” a pseudonymous account on Polymarket that made over $1 million trading on Google-related events, including a market on who the most-searched person of the year would be in 2025. (It was the singer D4vd, who is best known for his connection to an ongoing murder investigation after a young fan’s remains were found in a vehicle registered to him.)
Google did not respond to repeated requests for comment on its policies regarding insider trading on prediction markets. It’s not the only company to remain silent on how—or if—it is monitoring its workforce for insider trading on prediction markets; other tech giants including Meta and Nvidia also did not respond to WIRED’s inquiries about their policies.
Though this is the first confirmed case of a large technology company firing an employee over trades in prediction markets, it’s almost certainly not the last. Opportunities for tech sector employees to make trades on markets abound. “The data tells me this is happening all over the place,” Saincome says.
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