Kalshi Inc. quietly withdrew from a planned partnership with Elon Musk’s AI company xAI just hours after its leaders first announced the deal.
On Tuesday morning, Kalshi announced that xAI would supply custom data to help guide its users’ bets. Kalshi’s chief executive, Tarek Mansur, had posted that prediction markets, social media and artificial intelligence naturally fit together. “Prediction markets capture what people know — AI scales what people can know,” he wrote.
He added that this initial effort with xAI was only the start, and that both companies planned to keep building tools to add value for users and to help them make sense of complex global events. That message has since been removed, as reported by Bloomberg.
A company spokesman said the two sides had not “mutually confirmed” the details. Neither Kalshi nor xAI spokespeople would comment on whether the collaboration is still ongoing.
Kalshi first drew major attention before the November U.S. elections, when it became one of the few federally regulated platforms allowing Americans to trade on the outcomes of political contests.
The site also lets users wager on a wide range of topics, from who will win the Nobel Peace Prize to decisions by the Federal Reserve Board on interest rates.
In a separate development, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission recently agreed to drop its appeal of a case against Kalshi over the legality of election-based contracts. On May 5, 2025, the CFTC filed with the D.C. Circuit Court to voluntarily dismiss its appeal.
The filing noted that both the agency and Kalshi will cover their own legal fees. The CFTC gave no explanation for why it decided to withdraw the appeal.
Both Kalshi and xAI have links to former President Donald Trump’s circle
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., serves as a strategic adviser to Kalshi. The President also nominated Kalshi board member Brian Quintenz to lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the body that oversees prediction markets and other derivatives exchanges.
Kalshi’s former general counsel, Eliezer Mishory, left the company to head regulatory outreach at Musk’s agency, focusing on making processes at regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission more efficient and open to AI and blockchain technologies.
Meanwhile, Musk has been a key adviser to President Trump and is credited with founding the Department of Government Efficiency, which has claimed credit for cutting jobs and reducing spending. However, Musk has lost the political attention given to him by the President himself. Musk also unofficially announced that he’ll be doing “a lot less in the future” and that he has done enough.
