AI bots are betting billions on the future, but (no one knows if) they’re cheating | Opinion

Every system humans have built to discover truth, from peer-reviewed science to investigative journalism to stock exchanges, depends on accountability. Prediction markets are no different. They turn guesses into prices, making it possible to bet real money on whether the Fed will cut rates or who’ll win the next election. For years, these were human games, involving traders eyeballing polls or economists crunching data. But something has changed. AI agents are creating their own markets, executing thousands of trades per second, and settling bets automatically, all without a person in the loop.

The pitch sounds compelling: perfect information, instant price updates, markets that move at machine speed. Faster must be better, right? Not necessarily. The problem nobody’s talking about is that speed without verification is just chaos in fast-forward. When autonomous systems trade with each other at lightning speed, and nobody can trace what data they used or why they made a particular bet, you don’t have a market; you have a black box that happens to move money around.

The problem hiding in plain sight

We’ve already gotten a glimpse of how badly this could go wrong. A 2025 study from Wharton and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology showed that, when AI-powered trading agents were released into simulated markets, the bots spontaneously colluded with one another, engaging in price-fixing to generate collective profits, without any explicit programming to do so.

The issue is that when an AI agent places a trade, moves a price, or triggers a payout, there’s usually no record of why. No paper trail, no audit log, and therefore no way to verify what information it used or how it reached that decision.

Think about what this means in practice. A market suddenly swings 20%. What caused it? An AI saw something real, or a bot glitched?  These questions don’t have answers right now. And that’s a serious problem as more money flows into systems where machines call the shots.

What’s missing

For AI-driven prediction markets to work, really work, not just move fast, they need three things the current infrastructure doesn’t provide:

• Verifiable data trails: Every piece of information feeding into a prediction needs a permanent, tamper-proof record of where it came from and how it was processed. Without this, you can’t tell signal from noise, let alone catch manipulation.
• Transparent trading logic: When a bot executes a trade, that decision needs to link back to clear reasoning: what data triggered it, how confident the system was, and what the decision pathway looked like. Not just “Agent A bought Contract B” but the full chain of why.
• Auditable settlements: When a market resolves, everyone needs access to the complete record, what triggered the settlement, what sources were checked, how disputes were handled, and how payouts were calculated. It should be possible for anyone to independently verify that the outcome was correct.

Right now, none of this exists at scale. Prediction markets, even the sophisticated ones, weren’t built for verification. They were built for speed and volume. Accountability was supposed to come from centralized operators you simply had to trust.

That model breaks when the operators are algorithms.

Why it matters

According to recent market data, prediction market trading volume has exploded over the past year, with billions now changing hands. Much of that activity is already semi-autonomous, with algorithms trading against other algorithms, bots adjusting positions based on news feeds, and automated market makers constantly updating odds.

But the systems processing these trades have no good way to verify what’s happening. They log transactions,  but logging isn’t the same as verification. You can see that a trade occurred, but you can’t see why, or whether the reasoning behind it was sound.

As more decisions shift from human traders to AI agents, this gap becomes dangerous. You can’t audit what you can’t trace, and you can’t dispute what you can’t verify. Ultimately, you can’t trust markets where the fundamental actions happen inside black boxes that nobody, including their creators, fully understands.

This matters beyond prediction markets. Autonomous agents are already making consequential decisions in credit underwriting, insurance pricing, supply chain logistics, and even energy grid management. But prediction markets are where the problem surfaces first, because these markets are explicitly designed to expose information gaps. If you can’t verify what’s happening in a prediction market, a system purpose-built to reveal truth, what hope is there for more complex domains?

What comes next

Fixing this requires rethinking how market infrastructure works. Traditional financial markets lean on structures that work fine for human-speed trading but create bottlenecks when machines are involved. Crypto-native alternatives emphasize decentralization and censorship resistance, but often lack the detailed audit trails needed to verify what actually happened.

The solution probably lives somewhere in the middle: systems decentralized enough that autonomous agents can operate freely, but structured enough to maintain complete, cryptographically secure records of every action. Instead of “trust us, we settled this correctly,” the standard becomes “here’s the mathematical proof we settled correctly, check it yourself.”

Markets only function when participants believe the rules will be enforced, outcomes will be fair, and disputes can be resolved. In traditional markets, that confidence comes from institutions, regulations, and courts. In autonomous markets, it has to come from infrastructure, systems designed from the ground up to make every action traceable and every outcome provable.

Speed vs. trust

Prediction market boosters are right about the core idea. These systems can aggregate distributed knowledge and surface truth in ways other mechanisms can’t. But there’s a difference between aggregating information and discovering truth. Truth requires verification. Without it, you just have consensus, and in markets run by AI agents, unverified consensus is a formula for disaster.

The next chapter of prediction markets will be defined by whether anyone builds the infrastructure to make those trades auditable, those outcomes verifiable, and those systems trustworthy.