Kalshi and Polymarket Are Flying High. Can They Outrun the Regulators?Plus: Kalshi and Polymarket Are Flying High. Can They Outrun the Regulators?
I finally downloaded Kalshi this weekend, and got a crash course in what a real dopamine rush feels like. Social media has nothing on these prediction platforms. We break down how Kalshi and Polymarket are performing and the regulatory headwinds they’re facing, among other issues. We also dig into the top 100 consumer AI apps for March 2026, and the question that’s becoming impossible to ignore: Can the US actually control who gets to build AI infrastructure, or is that ship already sailing? Let’s get into it. Stay curious.
📰 AI News and Trends
Other Tech News
The US Moves to Control Who Gets to Build AI InfrastructureThe US Commerce Department is drafting regulations that would require U.S. approval for nearly all global exports of AI chips from companies such as Nvidia and AMD. Under the proposed framework, buyers of smaller quantities (under 1,000 GPUs) would undergo a simple review process, while larger data center projects would require pre-clearance and may be subject to conditions such as business disclosures or government site visits. The biggest deployments, over 200K GPUs, would require host governments to make security commitments and matching investments in American AI. The framework is still in draft form and faces pushback even within the Trump administration, which has distanced itself from Biden’s prior “AI diffusion rule” while not yet finalizing a replacement. Can the United States be the de facto gatekeeper of global AI infrastructure?Yes, the US can, but it’s not that simple:
And NO, because:
The deeper tension is that the US wants two things simultaneously: to be the world’s AI supplier and to use that position as geopolitical leverage. Those goals can conflict. Push too hard on conditions and countries diversify away; be too permissive, and you lose the leverage entirely. Whether Washington can thread that needle is genuinely unclear. 📚Learning Corner
The Top 100 Consumer AI apps
The latest ranking of the top 100 consumer AI apps paints a picture of a maturing market. For the first time, the list now includes mainstream tools like CapCut, Canva, and Notion, where AI has quietly become central to the core experience rather than a bolt-on feature. ChatGPT still dominates, with 900 million weekly active users, but competitors are closing in on specific fronts. Claude’s paid subscribers grew over 200% year-over-year, Gemini had a breakout year on the creative side, and roughly 20% of ChatGPT users now also use Gemini in any given week. The platforms are diverging in strategy. OpenAI is chasing the consumer super-app (shopping, travel, health), while Anthropic is doubling down on power users, developers, knowledge workers, and professionals. Geographically, the market is split into three. Western tools, a Chinese ecosystem anchored by DeepSeek and Doubao, and an emerging Russian pole built around Yandex and Sber. The US ranks just 20th in per-capita AI adoption; Singapore, UAE, and Hong Kong lead.
Creative tools have shifted from image-dominated to a broader mix of video, music, and voice, with Chinese video models leading on quality and standalone image generators losing ground to bundled features inside ChatGPT and Gemini. Agents are the new frontier. Vibe coding tools like Lovable and Replit are holding their audiences, while horizontal agents, OpenClaw (acquired by OpenAI), Manus (acquired by Meta for ~$2B), and Genspark, are starting to let everyday users hand off complex tasks entirely. The next six months will reveal whether consumers consolidate around one AI agent or keep juggling several. Kalshi and Polymarket Are Flying High. Can They Outrun the Regulators?
I’m probably late to the party, but I finally downloaded Kalshi this weekend after a conversation with some cousins-in-law in their mid-20s, and it was a good reminder of why it pays to listen to younger people when trying to understand where markets are heading. Opening the app for the first time was a jolt. I thought social media was addictive. I hadn’t seen anything yet. The range of what you can trade on is staggering: sports, politics, the economy, the weather. Some markets resolve in seconds. Others play out over months. The company’s CEO insists it’s not a betting platform, but when you’re staring at a screen full of live odds, and your finger is hovering over a position, that distinction feels academic. I had to actively stop myself from putting money in. That experience alone tells you everything you need to know about why regulators are paying close attention. It’s not just the financial implications of mainstream prediction markets; it’s the design. These apps are built to pull you back in, and they’re very good at it. The dopamine loop is real, and it’s been refined. We may look back at social media as the warm-up act. Kalshi and Polymarket, the two biggest players in the space, are both in early talks with investors about raising new rounds at valuations near $20 billion each, roughly double where they were just a few months ago. Kalshi, which is already live in the US and recently crossed a $1.5 billion annualized revenue run rate, was last valued at $11 billion after raising $1 billion in December from Sequoia and Paradigm. Polymarket, still blocked for US users but planning a domestic launch this year, was last valued at $9 billion following a deal with NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange. The growth is real, but so is the turbulence. Both platforms are facing a bipartisan bill in Congress that would ban markets on war, geopolitical events, and sports. They’re also under fire for aggressive college marketing tactics, including a case where Polymarket gave a fraternity cash in exchange for recruiting new users, and a wave of suspicious trades around Jeff Bezos’ Super Bowl whereabouts, placed by members of his stepson’s fraternity. Prediction markets have genuine utility as forecasting tools and are growing fast, but their push into sensitive topics and college campuses is drawing exactly the kind of regulatory attention that could reshape the business before it fully matures. 🧰 AI Tools of The DayEthical and Conversational AI
🚀 Showcase Your Innovation in the Premier Tech and AI Newsletter (link) As a vanguard in the realm of technology and artificial intelligence, we pride ourselves in delivering cutting-edge insights, AI tools, and in-depth coverage of emerging technologies to over 55,000+ tech CEOs, managers, programmers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts. Our readers represent the brightest minds from industry giants such as Tesla, OpenAI, Samsung, IBM, NVIDIA, and countless others. Explore sponsorship possibilities and elevate your brand's presence in the world of tech and AI. Learn more about partnering with us. Disclaimer: We do not give financial advice. Everything we share is the result of our research and our opinions. PLEASE do your own research and make conscious decisions. The web3 space can be highly volatile and risky.
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Monday, March 9, 2026
Kalshi and Polymarket Are Flying High. Can They Outrun the Regulators?
Thursday, March 5, 2026
🦵Washington Kneecapped a Top AI Lab. DeepSeek Is Watching.
Welcome to all our new subscribers, and to a fresh start. We’ve merged our Beehiiv and Substack into one home. Your comments, pushback, and ideas are always welcome, and our 1-on-1 conversation is always open. Today, we share how to lower your cloud dependency, with AI tools and tutorials to accomplish so. In a time of war, data centers, where all your data is housed, are becoming the main targets. Also How Chinese models are salivating as the Pentagon fights with Anthropic, and US models wonder if guardrails make sense anymore. Thank you for your time, and stay curious.
📰 AI News and Trends
Other Tech News
Washington Kneecapped a Top AI Lab. DeepSeek Is Watching.
When the Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic after CEO Dario Amodei refused to strip safety guardrails that would have permitted mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems, it set off a chain of consequences that extend well beyond one company’s government contracts, although the negotiations seem to continue. Defense Secretary Hegseth’s “supply chain risk” designation, a label normally reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei, forced defense contractors to certify they don’t use Claude, potentially gutting Anthropic’s enterprise base overnight and depriving the Pentagon of the only AI model cleared for classified systems. The unintended winners? Chinese labs. DeepSeek and its peers face device-level bans on government hardware, but crucially not the supply-chain designations that cripple commercial partnerships, meaning U.S. enterprises shut out of top domestic models can still legally adopt foreign alternatives. Airbnb uses Deepseek as it is a cheaper alternative than US models. Combine that regulatory asymmetry with DeepSeek’s aggressive open-weight releases, its cost advantage, and its strategic timing ahead of new model launches, and you have a market vacuum that Chinese AI is well-positioned to fill. Looking ahead, the precedent is arguably more dangerous than the immediate fallout. If principled domestic labs face penalties while foreign competitors operate without equivalent constraints, ethics itself becomes a liability in government contracting, pushing capital, talent, and enterprise adoption toward lower-standards ecosystems the U.S. cannot audit or govern. Questions for you.
The Fragile Internet We Built
We arrived here through decades of efficiency-driven consolidation, rather than running distributed infrastructure, businesses offloaded everything to a handful of hyperscalers, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, because it was cheaper, faster, and someone else’s problem. The primary vulnerability of today’s internet lies in its heavy reliance on cloud computing. This shift has resulted in numerous services depending on just a few key providers like Amazon and Microsoft. During the early days of the internet, businesses operated on their own infrastructure; when an issue arose in one area, others remained unaffected, but now, if a cloud provider faces difficulties, the repercussions resonate across multiple platforms. AI supercharged this dependency. Thousands of enterprise workflows are now baked into platforms like Claude, with some developers admitting they hadn’t written code themselves in months. This week proved how catastrophically exposed that leaves us. In the war now unfolding across the Middle East, a new kind of target has been added to the list: “data centers.” Drone strikes damaged three facilities operated by Amazon in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Consumer apps, including delivery platform Careem, payments companies Alaan and Hubpay, and banking providers including ADCB and Emirates NBD, all reported outages as a result of AWS infrastructure going down. The attacks are a reminder that cloud computing isn’t “magical” and still requires physical facilities on the ground, which are vulnerable to all sorts of disaster scenarios. Simultaneously, Claude experienced multiple high-profile disruptions within days, with outage trackers logging thousands of error reports, exposing how AI uptime is no longer a technical footnote but a business-critical event with global consequences. The implications are layered and serious. Geopolitical conflicts can now take down banking, payments, and logistics overnight; the concentration of AI inference into a few cloud providers means a single policy dispute or physical attack ripples into enterprise workflows worldwide; and Iran explicitly targeted Amazon’s Bahrain data center for the company’s support of “U.S. military and intelligence activities,” signaling that data centers are now considered legitimate military targets, a precedent with enormous consequences for any business or government running critical workloads in geopolitically sensitive regions.
🧰 AI Tools of The DayReduce Cloud Dependency. Build Your Own Resilience Stack Personal Cloud (Data Sovereignty)
Self-Hosted AI (No Cloud Dependency)
📚Learning CornerHome Servers
🚀 Showcase Your Innovation in the Premier Tech and AI Newsletter (link) As a vanguard in the realm of technology and artificial intelligence, we pride ourselves in delivering cutting-edge insights, AI tools, and in-depth coverage of emerging technologies to over 55,000+ tech CEOs, managers, programmers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts. Our readers represent the brightest minds from industry giants such as Tesla, OpenAI, Samsung, IBM, NVIDIA, and countless others. Explore sponsorship possibilities and elevate your brand's presence in the world of tech and AI. Learn more about partnering with us. Disclaimer: We do not give financial advice. Everything we share is the result of our research and our opinions. PLEASE do your own research and make conscious decisions. The web3 space can be highly volatile and risky.
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