Meta's Prediction App Would Let an AI Write the Questions and Call the Results
Internal documents describe Arena: play money, Llama-generated markets, and a model with the final say on whether an event happened.
Meta is preparing a standalone prediction market app, known internally as Arena, to compete with Kalshi and Polymarket, according to company documents and employees who described them on condition of anonymity.
Rather than real-money wagering, the app would give each user a daily allotment of play money to bet on yes-or-no questions about real-world events. The documents describe using the company's Llama model to automate most of the product: generating questions from trending topics, recommending markets to individual users, and resolving outcomes in near real time. The model would have the final say on whether a question's condition has been met.
The project has carried the codenames Antwerp and FBForecast alongside Arena. A prototype will be tested internally before any release on iPhone and Android; the documents give no public launch date. Meta declined to comment.
The second attempt
This is not the company's first try. In 2020 it launched Forecast, a crowdsourced app that let people guess at events including pandemic outcomes. It closed in 2022, and internal notes blamed the operational cost of curating questions by hand. Arena is a rebuild designed to remove that cost through automation.
The timing puts it into an unsettled legal environment. Kalshi and Polymarket handle billions of dollars in trades on everything from entertainment to geopolitics, and questions about manipulation, insider trading and whether such markets fall under Commodity Futures Trading Commission oversight have produced dozens of pending lawsuits. Gaming attorney Daniel Wallach said a play-money version could buy Meta time to seek regulatory clarity or a federal license.
The field is crowding regardless. DraftKings and FanDuel have launched prediction products, TruthSocial has announced plans, and more than 70 other companies are pursuing related projects.
Meta reaches billions of people daily across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, but its record with standalone apps is mixed. The documents present Arena as an AI-first bet: scale the question-writing and the judging, and stay clear of real money until the rules are clear.
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