Kalshi Asks Trump Administration to Let It Become Even More Dangerous

Kalshi, one of the largest U.S. prediction markets, is asking the Trump administration to help it attract more big bettors.

In a filing with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Tuesday, the company’s internal clearing house Kalshi Klear sought approval to offer margin trading on event contracts, CNBC reported.

If Kalshi is permitted to offer margin trading, then traders will be able to borrow funds from the company itself in order to gain or lose more than they invest—potentially exposing investors to a dangerous level of financial risk.

The addition of margin trading is viewed as crucial for attracting bigger institutions that already use the practice on traditional stocks and futures.

While sportsbooks derive their profit from losing bets by their customers, Kalshi gets its revenue from transaction fees for each wager placed. Bigger bettors means bigger bets, and more money for the house.

State gaming commissions have always limited credit given to bettors on sporting events contracts, but prediction market companies have argued that their sports-related products are the same thing as derivatives, and therefore can only be regulated by the CFTC. Michael Selig, the commissioner of the CFTC, has readily come to the defense of prediction markets.

A Kalshi spokesperson told CNBC that the company would refrain from allowing margin trading on sports-related event contracts, as well as on culture and the “mention” markets. Rather, the company said that margin trading would be applied to markets with expiration dates that are far in the future. As the expiry date approaches, the price to obtain this leverage would increase. The service would only be available to traders who use Kalshi Klear.

President Trump thinks the answer to skepticism about artificial intelligence is to try and change its name.

At the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday, Trump told the audience that the “United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now.”

“Here and after officially called ‘super intelligence’ changing the name and that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake, it’s actually amazing, but we have to be careful,” Trump said. “In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports.”

Trump said that all U.S. government documents “and hopefully the world’s” would be changed to mention “super intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence.”

“In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence—S.I. Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better, it is much better, and it’s much more accurate,” Trump said, before ominously hinting that he’d push hard for it. “Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. We’re gonna find out pretty soon.”

Trump appears to have gotten “super intelligence” from a poll he put on his Truth Social account Monday, in which he asked his followers, “Which name do we like for the new phenomena—SUPER INTELLIGENCE VS. SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE? President DONALD J. TRUMP.” “Super intelligence” won the very unscientific poll of his fan base by 30 percent.

It’s unclear why Trump believed this would be a good use of his time at the United Nations, but if he thinks trying to change “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence” is going to win over an American public increasingly opposed to corporate misuse of AI and the proliferation of data centers, he is severely mistaken. All that this lame rebranding attempt will do is open the president—and the U.S.—up to more ridicule.

President Trump and his aide Natalie Harp are the targets of a new lawsuit over the “Truth API” program, which offers Truth Social users early access to posts from government officials for $100,000 a month.

The suit was filed last Thursday by watchdog groups American Oversight and Campaign for Accountability, which argue that the president is essentially running a pay-to-play scheme, offering crucial information that impacts global markets and policy decisions to the highest bidder.

“Information the Trump Administration disseminates on Truth Social through its official accounts can have significant consequences for the global economy,” the suit reads.

Harp is named as defendant, as the lawsuit recognizes her as “the primary White House staffer responsible” for posting for Trump on Truth Social.

“President Trump and members of his administration are exploiting their offices to benefit a private company owned by the President, his family members, and allies,” said Samuel Davis, an attorney at Gerstein Harrow, LLP working on the suit. “This brazen scheme is illegal many times over and is an affront to the basic principle that the government exists to serve the people, not to enrich cronies and insiders.”

On Monday, the city of San Francisco followed up with its own lawsuit, arguing that Truth API is a “corrupt business scheme” that violates federal laws against insider trading as well as California’s Unfair Competition Law. That lawsuit targets Trump Media & Technology group and does not mention Harp specifically.

Trump has yet to respond to news of either lawsuit.

President Trump attempted to keep CNN from covering his speech at the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday.

When he arrived at the U.N. building in New York, Trump told off CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, saying, “You shouldn’t be here.”

“You should not be here covering me. You said you weren’t going to cover me, you shouldn’t be covering me,” Trump continued.

Collins tried to ask Trump about recent CNN polling showing two-thirds of Americans don’t think that the U.S. is winning the war with Iran, and when he thinks the war will end, but he ignored her. Collins later pointed out to viewers that CNN was credentialed by the U.N. and would be covering Trump’s speech regardless of the president’s White House ban on CNN, Politico, and MS NOW.

The television press pool, made up of Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, announced Monday that they would suspend their broadcasts of Trump, leaving conservative outlet Real America’s Voice as the only American TV outlet credentialed by the White House to cover Trump’s speech at the United Nations.

“This is to advise that, effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the president,” Fox News’s Bryan Boughton, who serves as television pool chair, said Monday. “This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place.”

CNN, Politico, and MS NOW are suing the president over the ban, but that doesn’t mean they will cease reporting about Trump altogether. He doesn’t seem to understand that, probably hoping that the ban and boycott mean he won’t be challenged and there won’t be anything critical published about him. Trump has continuously attacked the free press and ignored the First Amendment to the Constitution throughout his political career, but journalists have not been silenced.

President Trump’s confrontational, campaign-style speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday was met with silence and rejection, and both the Cuban and Iranian delegations walked out while he attacked them.

The beginning of Trump’s speech was met with several awkward silences, as he clearly waited for applause after declaring that “America is back and … stronger today than ever before.” He received none.

Later in his speech, the majority of the Iranian delegation chose to walk out after Trump asked the audience if he should “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly” or “drive them into hell with no chance of survival.” After that, the Cuban delegation did the same—reacting to Trump’s claim that Cuba is an “absolutely failed state.”

These statements are extremely damaging to any hope of diplomacy, as Trump has been making threats of total annihilation of the Islamic Republic for nearly seven months. Trump is also absolving the U.S. of any wrongdoing, as many of Cuba’s past and present issues can be directly tied to the U.S. embargo and blockade of the country, which has cut it off from vital survival resources. And yet Trump chose to use the U.N. bully pulpit to present his version of reality—one that Cuba and Iran’s leadership chose to walk away from rather than entertain.