Meta is planning to release a standalone prediction market app called Arena that will use artificial intelligence to generate betting questions and resolve wagers, according to internal company documents reviewed by NPR. The app, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has instructed a team to build, will offer users a daily virtual allotment of play money rather than real-money wagering, the documents show.
The move places Meta — whose apps are used by more than 3 billion people daily — as the largest Silicon Valley company yet to enter the prediction market sector, which some analysts project could become a $1 trillion industry. The company’s entry comes as the legal landscape for prediction markets remains unsettled, with more than 30 pending lawsuits over their regulation.
The new app, which has been codenamed “Antwerp” and “FBForecast,” will use Meta’s Llama large language model to automatically generate questions from trending topics, according to the internal documents. Meta’s AI will also make “personalized market recommendations” to users who download the app, the documents state.
That same artificial intelligence will resolve markets, meaning AI will have the final say over whether something did or did not happen. As on rival platforms Kalshi and Polymarket, the wagering happens around “yes” or “no” questions. This AI-driven resolving process will happen in “near real-time,” the documents state.
In 2020, Meta released an app called Forecast, a crowdsourced prediction market app where people could guess about what might happen in the world, including predictions about the course of the pandemic. The app was wound down two years later. The internal documents NPR reviewed cited “the operational cost of manual question curation” as the reason Meta shut that effort down. The documents say the new app now under development is a “rebuild” of that app.
When a prototype app is finished, Meta employees will test it before its full public launch for both iPhones and Android devices, the documents state. An exact release date was not specified. Meta declined to comment.
Developing a prediction market without real monetary stakes may seem counterintuitive, since the hope of making a handsome profit has drawn millions of users to Kalshi and Polymarket. But gaming lawyer Daniel Wallach, who watches the prediction market industry closely, said releasing the app without the ability to wager money could allow Meta more time to apply for a license to operate from federal regulators and provide breathing room for the contested legal landscape to become more settled.
“We’re clearly in legal limbo,” said Wallach, noting the more than 30 pending lawsuits over the legality of prediction markets. “And we might not have a clear answer for another year or two.”
Meta moving forward with its own prediction market service makes it the biggest-yet Silicon Valley player to enter the fray, even as questions over market manipulation, insider trading and how the markets can reshape reality or create perverse incentives continue to plague the sector.
Nonetheless, the industry has the backing of the Trump administration, with officials beginning the process of rewriting the federal rules overseeing prediction markets, which were shunned for decades by regulators.
“The prediction markets of today are a novel creation that only arrived at the dawn of the second Trump administration,” Wallach said. “And it’s launched all these legal fights over whether Congress ever intended for this kind of activity to be regulated by the CFTC,” he said, referring to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency overseeing prediction market sites.
Meta is just the latest player hoping to tap into the surging popularity of prediction markets. Traditional sports gambling sites, like DraftKings and FanDuel, have released their own prediction market services. President Trump’s TruthSocial has announced prediction market plans. And more than 70 other companies have launched prediction market projects or services, according to Event Horizon, a newsletter that tracks the prediction market industry.