Stephanie Hughes

One bet that saw a lot of action was whether Ali Khamenei would be ousted as the supreme leader in Iran.

Khamenei was killed over the weekend during a U.S.

military strike.

Kalshi didn't pay out the bets that were placed after Khamenei's death.

Instead, it reimbursed those traders, and this outraged some users on the site.

I talked about this with Paresh Dave at Wired.

Right.

I think Kalshi had mentioned in some places that there was a death carve-out, but not everybody would have been aware of it necessarily.

Meanwhile, Polymarket, a rival marketplace, reportedly removed the ability this week for traders to bet on whether a nuclear weapon would be detonated and when.

To me, it seems even if you had bet yes on this and you technically win, you're still a loser because there's a nuclear war.

Why do you think this is something that Polymarket offered in the first place?

Yeah.

And also, I mean, this did anger some lawmakers that these were questions that people are allowed to wager on at all.

How likely is it that you think that these sorts of bets will be allowed in the future?

These online prediction markets have been growing at sort of an insanely fast rate.

How do you think the current ethical discussion could shape how they grow in the future?

Okay, we'll see what happens there.

Let's move to our next story, which is that defense contractors are forced to drop Anthropic after a government blacklist.

So U.S.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week that companies that work with the DoD are not allowed to do business with Anthropic.