OpenAI fires employee for insider trading in predictive market

I launched OpenAI employee after investigating their activity on Market forecasting platforms Including Polymarket, WIRED has learned.

CEO of OpenAI Applications, Ransom Simodisclosed the termination in an internal letter to employees earlier this year. It said the employee “used confidential OpenAI information in connection with external prediction markets (such as Polymarket).”

“Our policies prohibit employees from using confidential OpenAI information for personal gain, including in prediction markets,” says spokeswoman Kayla Wood. OpenAI did not reveal the employee’s name or details of his deals.

Evidence indicates that this was not an isolated event. Polymarket operates on the Polygon blockchain network, so its trading ledger is pseudonymous but traceable. According to an analysis by financial data platform Unusual Whales, there have been clusters of activity, identified by the service as suspicious, around OpenAI-themed events since March 2023.

The extraordinary whales identified 77 positions in 60 wallet addresses as suspected insider trades, considering account age, trading history, and investment significance, among other factors. Suspicious deals depend on the release dates of products such as Sora, GPT-5the ChatGPT browser, as well as the career status of CEO Sam Altman. In November 2023, two days after Altman was dramatically fired from the company, a new wallet placed a huge bet that he would return, making profits of more than $16,000. The account never placed another bet.

The behavior fits typical patterns of insider trading. “The bottom line is the aggregation. In the 40 hours before OpenAI launched its browser, 13 brand new wallets with no trading history appeared on the site for the first time to collectively bet $309,486 on the correct outcome,” says Matt Sincum, CEO of Unusual Whales. “When you see a lot of new wallets making the same bet at the same time, it raises a real question about whether or not the secret is out.”

Prediction markets have increased in popularity in recent years. These platforms allow clients to purchase “event contracts” based 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 is a wide range of markets associated with events in the technology sector; You can trade on Nvidia’s quarterly earnings, when Tesla will launch a new car, or which AI companies will go public in 2026.

As platforms have grown, concerns have increased that they allow traders to benefit from insider knowledge. “This world of the prediction market makes the Wild West seem tame by comparison,” says Jeff Edelstein, a senior analyst at betting news site InGame. “If there is an existing market where the answer is known, someone will trade it.”

Earlier this week, Calc Announce They reported several cases of suspicious insider trading to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the government agency overseeing these markets. In one case, an employee of popular YouTuber Mr. Beast for two years and a $20,000 fine for making deals related to the streamer’s activities; In another case, far-right political candidate Kyle Langford was banned from the platform for trading in his election campaign. The company also announced a number of initiatives to prevent insider trading and market manipulation.

While Calci has aggressively promoted its crackdown on insider trading, Polymarket has remained silent on the issue. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

In the past, major deals in technology-themed markets have sparked speculation that employees at big tech companies are taking advantage by using their inside knowledge to gain an advantage. One notorious example is the so-called “Google whale,” A Account under a pseudonym On Polymarket, which made more than $1 million trading in Google-related events, including the market around the most searched person of the year in 2025. (It was the singer D4vd, who became famous for his connection to the ongoing murder investigation after the remains of a young fan were found in a car registered in his name.)