OpenAI failed WIRED learned of the employee after an investigation into his activities on prediction marketplaces, including Polymarket.
OpenAI’s general manager of applications, Fidji Simo, revealed the termination in an internal message to employees earlier this year. The employee, she said, “used confidential OpenAI information in connection with third-party prediction markets (e.g., Polymarket).”
“Our policies prohibit employees from using OpenAI’s confidential information for personal purposes, including in prediction markets,” says spokeswoman Kayla Wood. OpenAI did not disclose the employee’s name or details of his profession.
The evidence shows that this was not an isolated incident. Polymarket runs on the Polygon blockchain, so its trading ledger is pseudonymous but traceable. According to an analysis by financial data platform Unusual Whales, there have been clusters of activity that the service has flagged as suspicious around OpenAI-related events since March 2023.
Unusual Whales flagged 77 items across 60 wallet addresses as suspicious confidential transactions based on account age, transaction history and investment importance, among other factors. The suspicious transactions depended on the release dates of products such as Sora, GPT-5 and the ChatGPT browser, as well as the employment status of CEO Sam Altman. In November 2023, two days after Altman was dramatically fired from the company, the recent portfolio made a significant bet that he would come back with a profit of over $16,000. The account never placed another bet.
This behavior fits into patterns typical of insider transactions. “The differentiator is the grouping. In the 40 hours before OpenAI Browser launched for the first time, 13 brand new wallets with zero transaction history appeared on the site for a total of $309,486 bet on the right result,” says Matt Saincome, CEO of Unusual Whales. “When you see multiple fresh wallets placing the same bet at the same time, the real question becomes whether the secret will get out.”
In recent years, the popularity of prediction markets has skyrocketed. 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 is a wide range of markets related to events in the technology sector; you can trade on what Nvidia’s quarterly earnings will be, when Tesla will launch a recent car, or which AI companies will go public in 2026.
As platforms develop, there are concerns that they will allow investors to profit from insider knowledge. “Compared to this world of the prediction market, the Wild West looks inconspicuous,” says Jeff Edelstein, senior analyst at betting news site InGame. “If there is a market that has a known answer, someone will trade in it.”
Earlier this week, Kalshi announced that it had reported several suspected insider trading incidents to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the government agency that oversees these markets. In one case, an employee of popular YouTuber Mr. Beast was suspended for two years and fined $20,000 for making transactions related to the streamer’s activities; in another case, far-right political candidate Kyle Langford was banned from the platform for making deals on his own campaign. The company also announced a number of initiatives aimed at preventing insider trading and market manipulation.
While Kalshi heavily promoted the fight against insider trading, Polymarket remained noiseless on the matter. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
In the past, huge deals in tech-related markets have sparked speculation that Gigantic Tech insiders are profiting by using their insider knowledge to gain an advantage. One notable example is the so-called “Google whale”, a pseudonymous account on Polymarket, which earned more than $1 million from Google-related events, including the market’s most searched person of the year in 2025. (It was singer D4vd, who is best known for his ties to an ongoing murder investigation after the remains of a newborn fan were found in his vehicle registered to him).