OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading

#81

Post by danny_codes » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

notepad0x90 wrote: post #46

crazygringo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. There are good reasons why it's a problem in financial markets but NOT usually a problem in prediction markets: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/02/18/why-insider-tra... > In prediction markets, informed trading is not a crime or an injustice—it is a valuable service. A big exception, however, is using prediction markets to make predictions on events regarding publicly traded companies.

why are publicly traded companies special? The speculation is not on securities. You're not participating in a "market" (even though they call it that), you're purely gambling and speculating. People have been doing this since currency was a thing. Even gambling laws don't apply in my opinion. If I told you the government will publish evidence of aliens existing tomorrow, and we make a bet on it, that's not really ga…

It’s literally gambling what are you talking about

Re: OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading

#82

Post by cc-d » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

tyre wrote: post #75

cc-d wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SEC only exists for dad to frame people. The vast majority of insider trading schemes are not prosecuted, many leave no evidence trail at all without going deep into black-op classified territory.

Prediction markets are regulated by the CFTC in the US. Your point stands, for now at least, since the CFTC seems entirely uninterested in prosecuting or regulating.

Thanks for making me aware of another federal agency :)

Seems to me prosecuting or regulating this sort of activity is futile, and pretty much serve only the interests of the mob. These markets make additional data open source, which otherwise might exclusively belong only to mob, so that's pretty cool. We democratized buying airstrikes.

It You may know how bad things really are, but if you don't, the lawboys are pretty much just playing pretend at this point, and have been for a while.

Mob wants me to add: if you try to buy an airstrike with our very based and functional cryptocurrency systems, you will probably just find mob. We have mob priced in, anybody with a significant amount of cryptocurrency knows this too.

It's not as simple as "buy an airstrike" comrade (we are referencing the person writing this post)

Re: OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading

#83

Post by peterjliu » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

I mentioned a potential OpenAI insider in https://x.com/peterjliu/status/2024901585806225723, that was from 5 minutes of investigation. There are probably more. And then there's a lot of other companies.

Re: OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading

#84

Post by ddp26 » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

Prediction markets are interesting when they are predicting future things nobody knows for sure.

"Predicting" private, known information is the wrong use case.

Re: OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading

#85

Post by strix_varius » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #55

Good. I do hope corporations in general take a harder stance on this. From a society perspective people with inside knowledge fleecing randoms is not a win. We've got that somewhat under control on the stock exchange, but have this absurd situation where on prediction markets it is a free for all and everyone pretends this is fine. I also think corporations should distance themselves from individuals willing to fleec…

Honestly it seems stupid but fine to me. Like if someone random comes up to me on the sidewalk and says hey if OpenAI announces a browser tomorrow, you give me $100. If not I'll give you $1000. Obviously I'm not going to take them up on it, they clearly have inside information.

If you're betting on a prediction market without insider information then you're just... The fool who is soon parted from his money one way or another.

I generally feel like people should be free to do whatever insane stuff they want with their own lives.

Re: OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading

#86

Post by tyre » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #77

tyre wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't insider trading on a prediction market only wrong to the extent the insider is violating some duty of secrecy to the company? Yes. Prediction markets, for corruption reasons, are regulated by the CFTC. In commodities markets, actors are assumed to be making trades based on propriety information. Hedging is the whole purpose! > …like it's a stock market where there is some society-level interest in giving part…

I don't think your example refutes the fairness heuristic at all. The first case is completely fair because anybody else could have done the same thing without any special access required. The second case is unfair because you had to work at the company to get access.

Okay, then imagine you overhear at a bar. Yes “anyone could have” theoretically, but not actually. In either case, you have material non-public information that your counterparty in the market does not.

Re: OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading

#87

Post by 0xTJ » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

chazftw wrote: post #4

That’s pretty common, you may think you own the data you work on, but you don’t. It’s proprietary confidential.

Who would think that? At every corporation where I've worked it's been explicit in both the contract and in HR training that this is explicitly not allowed.

Re: OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading

#88

Post by asah » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

ruined wrote: post #25

xrd wrote: post #3

A fun aside: this person obviously created a bunch of new Bitcoin accounts to hide their activity. It makes you think that if you were able to surreptitiously add malicious side channel software into a popular npm package that you wouldn't just need to hunt for crypto wallets with balances. You could also probably find a market for crypto wallets with small balances or zero balances. The history and date of creation…

you can't "change the password" on a wallet, so a "used" wallet is highly unattractive. anything you put in it could be taken by the original keyholder who sold it to you.

just move it to a new wallet

Re: OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading

#89

Post by idiotsecant » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

cjonas wrote: post #5

Insider trading is so trivial on the prediction markets. I'd guess that it's actually the "feature" that results in the outcomes being so accurate.

Of course. The point is not to make individual players money (that does sometimes happen as a side effect) it's to leverage their greed to find truth.

Re: OpenAI fires an employee for prediction market insider trading

#90

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 28, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

7777777phil wrote: post #19

77 suspicious positions across 60 wallets, 13 brand-new accounts appearing 40 hours before the browser launch. First confirmed case of a major tech company firing over prediction market trades. I wrote about why prediction markets have a structural insider trading problem that nobody's solved yet: https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-absolute-insider-mess-of...

[deleted]