Maybe this all sounds far-fetched, but it shouldn’t. “Any advance noEce to an adversary is problemaEc,” Alex Goldenberg, a fellow at the Rutgers Miller Center who has wriRen about war markets, told me. “And these predicEve markets, as they stand, are designed to leak out this informaEon.” In all likelihood, he added, intelligence agencies across the world are already paying aRenEon to Polymarket. Last year, the military’s bulleEn for intelligence professionals published an arEcle advocaEng for the armed forces to integrate data from Polymarket to “more fully anEcipate naEonal security threats.” ATer all, the Pentagon already has some experience with predicEon markets. During the War on Terror, DARPA toyed with creaEng what it billed the “Policy Analysis Market,” a site that would let anonymous traders bet on world events to forecast terrorist aRacks and coups. (Democrats in Congress revolted, and the site was quickly canned.) Now every adversary and terrorist group in the world can easily access war markets that are far more advanced than what the DOD ginned up two decades ago. What makes Polymarket’s entrance into warfare so troubling is not just potenEal insider trading from users like “magamyman.” If governments are eyeing Polymarket for signs of an impending aRack, they can also be led astray. A government or another sophisEcated actor wouldn’t need to spend much money to massively swing the Polymarket odds on whether a Gulf state will imminently
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