Meta Builds ‘Arena,’ an AI Prediction-Market App

Meta is building a standalone prediction-market app — internally codenamed “Antwerp” and “FBForecast,” and slated to launch publicly as “Arena” — where users wager virtual “play money” on the outcome of real-world events, according to internal documents first reported by The New York Times and detailed by NPR on June 24. CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally ordered the team to start building it, a sign of how aggressively Meta wants into a sector some analysts project could swell into a roughly $1 trillion market.

What makes Arena a distinctly 2026 product is how much of it runs on AI. Meta plans to use Llama, its large language model, to automatically generate market questions from trending topics, serve “personalized market recommendations” to each user, and then resolve those markets in near real-time by judging whether the predicted outcome actually happened. In other words, the model writes the bets, pitches them to you, and calls the result — a degree of automation that the company hopes will avoid the manual-curation costs that sank its earlier effort.

Meta is wading into a crowded and combative field. Kalshi and Polymarket have turned event contracts into a mainstream phenomenon, and incumbents including DraftKings, FanDuel and Robinhood have rushed in alongside more than 70 other operators. Shares of several of those listed players slid when the Meta plans surfaced, reflecting fears that a platform with billions of users could reshape the economics of the category overnight. Meta's use of play money rather than cash is widely read as an attempt to capture the engagement of prediction markets while sidestepping the thicket of gambling regulation.

That regulatory thicket is real. Gaming lawyers describe the prediction-market space as being in “legal limbo,” with more than 30 pending lawsuits and an unresolved fight over whether the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has jurisdiction. The Trump administration is rewriting federal rules even as the cases work through the courts, leaving any new entrant exposed to sudden shifts in what is and isn't allowed.

Meta has been here before. It launched a crowdsourced prediction app called Forecast in 2020 and wound it down two years later, in part because keeping markets accurate and well-curated by hand proved expensive. The bet this time is that Llama can do cheaply and at scale what humans could not — generating, recommending and adjudicating markets automatically — turning a discarded experiment into a flagship use case for Meta's AI.