Meet the Guys Betting Big on AI Gambling Agents

When Carson Szeder turned five dollars into more than a thousand by betting on an NFL game last year, he knew he was onto something major. “Definitely my biggest win,” he says. He hadn’t scored because he was especially deft at football analytics—or because he was particularly lucky. Instead, he says he used an AI program to help him decide how to gamble.

Since a federal ban on sports betting was struck down in the United States seven years ago, gambling on the internet has exploded in popularity. Last year, Americans spent over $150 billion on sports-related wagers, with many placing bets on their phones rather than boarding a flight to Vegas. The American Gaming Association reported a nearly 24 percent jump in popularity in sports betting in the US in 2024, and the obsession shows no signs of slowing down.

The mania has coincided with a modern AI gold rush. Now, the race is on to combine the economy-shaking pursuits, and a cottage industry has emerged to give bots the ability to place bets. So far, there’s no huge wave of newly minted millionaires sitting atop piles of money won using AI agents. But some fortune hunters are already jostling to establish AI-powered services that will turn ordinary gamblers into winners.

Take Szeder, founder of the AI gambling startup MonsterBet, says his tools give customers an edge. “We have some people who are probably hitting around 56 to 60 percent of the time, myself included,” he claims. (Standard odds are around 52 percent.) Szeder, a computer science major, first started building sports betting algorithms as an undergrad, at the behest of his college buddies who loved to gamble. He began incorporating AI into these experiments at the beginning of 2025, when he created an assistant called MonsterGPT to select bets on professional sports in the US. It uses projection models he designed combined with information scraped from across the internet. MonsterGPT accesses web scrapers through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a process that allows AI tools to incorporate new data from external sources on top of their training materials. Now, Szeder is trying to turn his hobby into a full-blown business, which he promotes on social platforms with posts like “Here’s How I Made $1.2K From My Sports Betting Software Yesterday.” He charges $77 a month for access to MonsterGPT and other tools.

There’s no shortage of competition. Rithmm, a Massachusetts-based startup, charges $30 for its basic “AI-powered sports intelligence” package. A firm called JuiceReel offers a free basic app for the same purpose. Some of these companies offer AI agents that select picks but don’t actually place bets on behalf of users. Others simply market themselves as betting-tip services that happen to use AI without bothering to mention agents at all.

This is the route that larger, more established players in the industry tend to take. This spring, FanDuel launched a chatbot called Ace, which offers analysis and tips on certain sports but does not allow for automated wagering. “The power to place bets should always stay in the hands of our customers themselves—not bots, AI agents, or anything (or anyone) else,” says FanDuel vice president of product innovation and transformation Jon Sadow.

Some up-and-comers are pushing to make agents that can actually place wagers instead of just supplying tips, but the field is off to a rough start. Tom Fleetham formerly worked as the head of business development for a blockchain platform called Zilliqa that experimented with an AI gambling agent called Ava, focused on picking horse race winners. “She had good analysis, good results,” he says. “Where it got hard was actually trying to place the bets.”

The company couldn’t get Ava to reliably place bets using crypto wallets in a timely fashion, Fleethem claims. “It took forever,” Fleetham says. “We gave up.”

YouTube is awash in tutorials about how to create and manage gambling agents that can place bets on behalf of humans. But again, these services do not appear to be minting new millionaires—or even thousandaires. Siraj Raval, a YouTuber who publishes videos about how to make money using AI, has promoted a side project called WagerGPT on his channel. He claims the tool is capable of placing bets, and he charges people $199 a month for access. “As of eight months ago, I implemented a feature to let WagerGPT place bets. Now it's doing that for the users full-time,” Raval claims. According to Raval, WagerGPT scans over 40 sports books and “spots all sorts of variables that humans can’t.” Ravel invited WIRED to join a Telegram group he claimed was full of people using WagerGPT, but the channel was largely inactive, and most of the recent messages were questions about what’s going on with the service. “It’s completely dead,” alleges Pete Sanchez, one of the participants. “Waste of money.”

As AI agents cannot control traditional bank accounts, most of the fully automated betting products focus on sports gambling websites and prediction markets that take cryptocurrency, as many agents can and do operate crypto wallets. One of the largest mainstream projects to allow AI agents to make all sorts of transactions on behalf of humans is Coinbase’s AgentKit. It imagines a world in which agents can execute a number of financial transactions, from purchasing airline tickets to trading crypto and, yes, placing bets on sports. Lincoln Murr, an AI product manager at Coinbase, says that a lot of AgentKit’s early use cases “were speculative in nature” and noted he hadn’t seen anything particularly successful. “How profitable these agents truly are, I don’t know,” he says. The one he’s been paying the most attention to is called Sire. The project describes itself as “an agentic sports-betting hedge fund” and operates as a DAO. (In crypto terms, DAO means decentralized autonomous organization—a member-owned community that uses blockchain-based contracts). “Those types of things are the direction we’re heading,” Murr says.

Sire (which was previously called DraiftKing, but had to rebrand for legal reasons) is in the process of a relaunch. Max Sebti, the CEO of its parent company, Score, says the company uses a combination of public and private data as well as “computer vision tech that is watching the games” to get the most up-to-date information possible in order to determine winning bets. Score’s business model is a complicated mashup of crypto and gambling. Eventually, the company plans to allow anyone to transfer USD into a wallet, which will then be converted into a stablecoin. After that, the plan is that Sire’s AI agents will pool the money with payments from other customers and place bets on decentralized sports books and prediction markets that accept crypto, including Polymarket. Then, Sebti says, the gents will redistribute the winnings back to the community. Septi describes the initiative as “a very steady, hedge-fund like product.” Anyone can add money to a wallet, but to take winnings out, there’s a “performance fee” that must be paid to Sire—one that can be reduced if the customer purchases the company’s crypto token. The service comes out of beta this month.

Another remarkably convoluted AI gambling agent project already in full swing is Memetica, which is run by an AI startup called QStarLabs. When we first spoke, QStar CEO Yang Tang emphasized that a large part of Memetica’s business model centered on using “agents” as promotional tools for various crypto tokens. “We’re a crypto company,” he stressed in March.

By April, Yang had changed his tune. “We've pivoted ourselves a little bit,” he said. Instead of positioning Memetica as a platform for people to buy tokens connected to various sports betting agents, he’d started focusing on creating custom agents for online sports-book clients. These “agents” were, in the style of MonsterGPT, able to offer tips and analysis on how to place bets, but did not automate the betting process. They were, in essence, promotional gimmicks. One of the first partnerships Memetica struck was with Divvy, a decentralized platform that accepts Solana for sports bets. Memetica created an agent for Divvy called Divinia, which primarily exists on X to post missives like “Promoted sides COOKING Manchester United! Sunderland, Burnley, Leeds all got wins before United even sniffed one Early season CHAOS at http://divvy.bet #PremierLeague.” The idea is, in essence, that people will see agents like Divinia on X and then be enticed to check out the associated sports books.

This August, Yang noted that Memetica had “fully pivoted” to “being an AI application company focused on iGaming.” The company is now designing promotional AI agents for over a dozen clients, Yang says.

Major sports betting platforms are not yet facing an existential threat over supercharged agents capable of beating the odds. But these efforts to bolt “agentic” tools onto the roaring gambling industry are worth watching, both as examples of how hype about AI agents can often outpace utility—and because we’re likely only at the beginning of the push to meld gambling and AI into one technology. According to Yang, he’s already seeing scammers try to bilk people using tactics that long predate the dawn of artificial intelligence. One scam involves a betting tips service telling half its subscribers that one team will win and the other half the other team will win, assuming they can convert enough people into paying customers to generate a profit, while shedding those who were given the losing tips. “We’re not nefarious people, so we don’t do that with our agents,” Yang says. “But all of these tricks are well known.”

This story was supported by Tarbell Grants.