There are 34 candidates in total, a record for a UK parliamentary by-election, including Laurence Fox, Piers Corbyn, a local reality TV personality, and a man described in local press as a “human fox,” who has since withdrawn citing the fact that it had become a circus. Howling Laud Hope of the Monster Raving Loony Party is also standing, as he was in Makerfield, as he is in most things.

The sequence of events that produced this situation runs as follows. In April, it emerged that Farage had received a £5 million personal gift from Christopher Harborne, the Thailand-based cryptocurrency investor who has given £12 million total to Reform UK, including a £9 million single donation that remains the largest living political donation in UK history. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards opened an inquiry into whether the gift should have been declared. It had not been. Farage also faces scrutiny over £2.3 million in outside earnings received during his two years as an MP, including payments from GB News and arrangements involving his aide George Cottrell, who has a prior fraud conviction in the United States. Farage denied breaking any parliamentary rules in either case, announced he had “had enough” of questions about his finances, and resigned his seat.

The parliamentary standards inquiry pauses when an MP is no longer an MP. It resumes if they win a by-election and return.

Farage framed the resignation as “the people versus the establishment.” He announced he would immediately re-stand, letting the voters of Clacton be “the judges of my actions.” This is a more elegant mechanism than it first appears: resign to pause the inquiry, win the seat back, return to parliament with a fresh democratic mandate, face an inquiry whose findings you can now describe as politically motivated.

The problem with this plan is that winning the seat back means facing the inquiry.

If the Commissioner finds against him, he could be suspended or forced to resign again, triggering another by-election that opposition parties have already said they would actually contest.

A Farage loss, on the other hand, means the leader of Britain’s most popular party has lost his own seat in a by-election he personally called, while coming second to a man dressed as a bin.

Rachel Reeves, who as Chancellor had to formally accept the resignation, wrote: “If he wants to spend the summer arguing with a bin, I won’t stop him.” David Lammy, standing in for the Keir Starmer at PMQs, told the Commons: “The City trader, Putin-admiring, professional politician who is pals with crypto billionaires versus Count Binface.”

The boycott from the major parties deserves slightly more scrutiny than it’s getting. The stated reason is that the by-election is a stunt. This is also conveniently risk-free. The Conservatives cannot afford to finish third in a coastal Essex seat against their most dangerous rival. Labour under Burnham’s recent leadership has no interest in a distraction. The Greens and Lib Dems have nothing to gain in Clacton. By refusing to stand, every party gets to call it a circus while avoiding the humiliation of losing to Farage in a race they chose not to enter. Farage, in turn, gets the “people vs establishment” framing he wanted.

This is not the first time Clacton has hosted this particular manoeuvre. In 2014, Douglas Carswell resigned as the Conservative MP for Clacton, defected to UKIP, then led by Farage, triggered a by-election, and won, becoming UKIP’s first ever elected MP.

Jon Harvey, the comedian behind Count Binface, has contested at least six elections since 2019. He ran against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge, against Rishi Sunak in Richmond, twice in London mayoral races, getting 24,260 votes in 2024. He stood in Makerfield in June. He is now the main challenger to the leader of the UK’s most polled party.

On Radio 4’s Today programme, asked whether he thought he could win, he said: “Probably not, but then you know my job is to celebrate and defend the wonders of British democracy.” Asked about the other parties dropping out: “Are they running scared from old Binny, or do they think Nigel’s running a cunning stunt?”

His campaign pledges: build at least one affordable home, cap 99 Flakes at 99p (a British ice cream with a Cadbury chocolate bar stuck in it, named after its original price, which it has not been since approximately the Blair government), abolish auto-renew subscriptions. These are jokes. They are also, given that Clacton is among the most deprived constituencies in England and that Farage made fewer spoken Commons contributions than almost any other senior Reform MP during his two years as the area’s representative, a reasonably pointed set of jokes. Binface has also received a tactical voting endorsement from people who would rather vote for a bin than validate the by-election.

There are also markets on the wider field. To run in a UK parliamentary election you must pay a £500 deposit, which you get back if you win more than 5% of the vote. With 34 candidates, "Will anyone other than Farage and Binface get their deposit back?" is currently at 31%, implying the protest vote may not consolidate cleanly behind the bin, and that Laurence Fox, Piers Corbyn, or the “Nick The Incredible Flying Brick” still might have a shot.

If you have a view on whether a man in a bin helmet can unseat Britain's most prominent populist, the market is open at 7% (considerably below the 33% of British adults who told Ipsos they'd prefer it that way). There's also a market on whether Farage wins his own seat back, whether the standards inquiry concludes against him if he does, and, if you're feeling creative, whether the by-election triggers yet another by-election.

Happy Forecasting!

- Above the Fold

On one hand, FIFA’s own disciplinary code (specifically Article 27) does allow its judicial bodies to suspend the implementation of a sanction. Infantino maintained throughout that “FIFA’s judicial bodies are independent. They operate autonomously, apply the FIFA Disciplinary Code, and decide cases based on the applicable regulations and the specific facts before them.” Secretary of State Rubio, admitting things were “maybe turning into an international incident,” noted that Balogun’s “head wasn’t even looking down” during the challenge. The red card came via VAR review, and VAR has generated controversy throughout this tournament.

On the other hand, this is the first time in modern World Cup history that a red card has not resulted in a match suspension. Trump personally took credit:

Thank you to FIFA for doing what was right, and reversing a great injustice! President DONALD J. TRUMP.

Sepp Blatter wrote that “Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls.” UEFA called the decision “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable.” The Belgian federation noted that, uniquely for this match, FIFA omitted the automatic suspension section from the pre-match meeting, and when they asked why, didn’t receive an answer.

I think both of these takes have something to them, but the political neutrality concern is the more serious one. Infantino has called Trump “a close friend,” attended the inauguration, created the FIFA Peace Prize specifically for Trump after he didn’t win the Nobel version, and declared on Instagram after Trump’s inaugural rally that “together, we will make not only America great again, but also the entire world.” The last time a red card at a World Cup didn’t result in a suspension was 1962: Brazil’s Garrincha, the Chilean president backed a petition, Peru’s president reportedly called the referee. Brazil won the final 3-1.

FairSquare has now referred Infantino to IOC ethics investigators for breach of political neutrality. The Norwegian football federation (of which more shortly) has backed this. The IOC said it’s “watching everything play out.”

Markets are saying there is essentially no chance that the decision is reversed, with the possibility of Trump interfering in the tournament for a second time being real.

Belgium won 4-1 anyway. Their post-match social was a photo of Lukaku’s last-minute goal captioned “Overturn this.”

The precedent, it turns out, was immediately useful. England's Jarell Quansah received a straight red card on Sunday night for a tackle on Jesús Gallardo in the 3-2 win over Mexico. Labour MP Noah Law (perhaps one of the more important things the MP of St Austell and Newquay got to do) promptly wrote a public letter to Infantino asking for the ban to be reviewed, directly citing the Balogun decision.

"Whilst I believe that it was right for Jarell Quansah to have received this red card and that refereeing rules must be applied consistently," the letter said, "I believe it would be right to delay his suspension until after the completion of the World Cup."

Thomas Tuchel was asked, perhaps half-jokingly, whether Trump could get involved. FIFA has not yet responded and Quansah remains suspended.

Now, an enormous upset.

Erling Haaland scored twice in New York on Sunday, and Brazil (five-time champions, pre-tournament favourites) are out. Norway have never done anything like this at a World Cup. Haaland has seven goals in four appearances.

Markets price Norway’s chances of winning the World Cup at around 6%. This makes sense; they have a tough draw ahead of them.

Haaland vs England is the match I’m looking forward to. England have been well-organised under Tuchel, Bellingham has been excellent, and Haaland scores in basically every game.

All three co-hosts are eliminated. Canada fell 3-0 to Morocco. Mexico lost 3-2 to England at the Estadio Azteca, ending a 22-match unbeaten streak. Portugal lost to Spain 1-0, ending Cristiano Ronaldo's World Cup career.

France are the heavy tournament favourites. They've won five games without needing extra time, having scored freely and conceded almost nothing, and they just beat Morocco yesterday in Boston in an impressive display of skill.

Spain haven’t conceded a goal in the tournament, but haven’t dominated their matches since the group stage. Their game with Belgium is currently underway.

Argentina narrowly survived Egypt in extra time, during which period their odds to win the tournament reportedly reached +4500 at certain books. Manifold’s own graph was also…messy.

Enzo Fernández scored in the 93rd minute. Messi has seven goals in the tournament, leading the Golden Boot.

Golden Boot: Mbappe (8), Messi (8), Haaland (7), Kane (6). All four are still in the tournament.. Haaland was doubting his own chances on his Snapchat stories, accepting he had almost certainly lost the race after Messi’s performance, but his execution against Brazil has almost certainly dramatized things.

The ManifoldSports market has seen high trader participation across all 104 World Cup matches and is breaking expectations.

The auto-resolve system has been generating and resolving match markets throughout all of this. The official ManifoldSports games are all live and tradeable through the quarterfinals and beyond, and if you’re interested in user-created markets alongside the official games: group finishes, player props, and stranger things, the Community Tab at manifold.markets/sports/world-cup-2026 has them.

Happy Forecasting!

- Above the Fold

Politico’s reporting from Monday afternoon on a serious sexual assault allegation against Platner was the final shoe to drop. While a steady string of unsavory findings about Platner’s past have been uncovered over the last few months, this was a bridge too far for most of Platner’s backers. Bernie Sanders, Jon Favreau, Ro Khanna, and others have all asked him to step aside, and markets believe he will with 97% confidence.

Platner is dragging out the process, with the intent of extracting some kind of concession from the Maine Democratic Party to nominate a candidate with a similar political ideology. As a result, it’s very possible that the saga lasts into next week, although a July 13th deadline to get Platner off the ballot and find a replacement constrains the timeline somewhat. Markets think there’s nearly a 2/3 chance he resigns by Friday:

If and when Platner drops out, there’s a highly uncertain process to replace him. Maine Democrats are trying to design some rapid process that involves voter participation. But markets are unsure who this would end up selecting.

Who’s Next?

Troy Jackson is a heavy favorite, though, as he is (1) not Graham Platner but (2) close to Graham Platner in policy and style. Jackson finished third in the Maine governor primary after Nirav Shah and Hannah Pingree, just a month ago, and was a backer of Platner.

Shenna Bellows, the second most likely candidate, finished fourth in that election, and also seems loosely ideologically aligned with Platner. Unfortunately, she already lost to Collins in a landslide Senate election in 2014!

Shah is not ideologically aligned with Platner, but finished narrowly second in the governor’s primary (and indeed won the first round) making him an obvious candidate for replacing Platner.

It appears that Platner’s choice himself (despite denials that he’s putting a thumb on the scale) might be Valli Geiger, a state representative in Maine. Author and Platner supporter Stephen King also comes in at longshot odds of 0.3%, if Maine voters decide to go in a very outsider direction.

Odds in November

I’m skeptical of the Platner campaign’s internal polling of potential replacements, which were leaked earlier today, but fortunately running multiple conditional markets on each of them is feasible on Manifold, unlike other prediction market platforms!

Jackson, Shah, and Bellows would all be slight favorites going into the general election in November, and broadly speaking, market on Democratic odds for that Senate seat are around 60%, just above what they were before Platner’s latest scandal dropped (and well above what they were when people briefly thought he might not drop out but weather the scandal).

In case you were interested in the other election in Maine, well, there’s not a ton of intrigue there…

Happy Forecasting!

-Above the Fold

Many of our best traders have been recruited by trading firms. You could be next!

• We launched an early version /jobs page listing open roles. It’s reachable from the new sidebar “More” menu, and /careers, /job-board, etc. all redirect there.

  

  

• If you’re looking for work, underemployed, or maybe hoping to transition into something more interesting — register your interest so we know who to connect you with.

Being interested in this space is a great signal for employers, even if you have had terrible luck trading. It takes less than 30 seconds, and there’s literally zero downside. I encourage everyone to check it out!

New: 2026 Midterms

New Midterms custom page, found on the browse page.

So far, it features entirely community-created markets. Featuring these markets is an indication that we trust these creators/markets and expect good resolutions. We will step in to prevent any misresolutions, but hopefully won’t need to. Huge thank you to our excellent creators who have made these markets far in advance.

If you have any markets you would like featured, please let me know! Ideally, tell us exactly how/where you would like it implemented. For example, if you click on Iowa, Ohio, or Minnesota in the Senate map, you will see extra markets attached with who is running. I’d like to add more things like this.

If you would like your markets removed because you intend to resolve in a ~strange way, let us know. Same goes for traders who spot markets with less-than-ideal criteria.

Betting & Markets

• The versus bet modal pre-selects a side now. Instead of the old two-step “pick a side, then a buy form appears” flow (with that jarring layout jump), the modal opens straight into betting with both sides shown as a selector you can flip between in place.

• World Cup knockout matches use that same standard versus modal, so two-team match markets bet the same way everywhere on the site.

• Niche topics no longer get buried in your feed. Previously, tagging a market with an accurate broad topic (like “Business”) alongside a niche one (like “Mining”) could drag it down in your feed ranking. We changed the math so a strong niche match still surfaces the market to people who care about it.

• Hardened betting against a rare race condition when lots of bets land on the same market at once. New bugs, new solutions! Should all be fixed now.

World Cup & Sports

• Live goal & VAR markers on match charts. When a goal is scored, we now auto-drop a marker right on the price spike where the market reacted, and a second marker if VAR reverses the goal. It’s not perfect (in this case, VAR reversal came up before the goal), but it’s pretty cool and I’m proud of it. 85% market swing, both ways!

• @ManifoldSports posts the final score as a comment when a match market resolves, so the result is right there on the page.

• Resolved match markets leave your feed faster. Finished World Cup markets now drop out of your home/browse feed 15 minutes after they resolve so they stop cluttering things up. They’re still fully searchable and live on the dashboard.

• A handful of sports dashboard touch-ups: a “see resolved matches” / back-to-top scroll button, a share button in the header, a shiny World Cup pill (+ back button) in browse, fixed UK home-nation flags, and better handling of knockout-stage names.

Reminder: You can share the World Cup dashboard with the share button at the top; this will include your referral code! If you ever feel like a referral was missed that you should have received, bug me about it. I want to fix every referral bug, and even if I can’t, if they confirm you referred them, we are happy to pay you out.

Verifying, Bonuses & New Users

• Speaking of referrals.. We have clarified on the membership page how referral payouts work (paid in two parts, and the multiplier is set by the referrer’s tier at payout time).

• We also fixed the referral page to contain useful (and accurate!) information about the status of anyone you have referred.

• You can now buy mana with a credit card before verifying your identity. No more being routed to a verification wall just to make a purchase.

• Buying mana unlocks full bonus earning — a completed purchase now earns you bonuses at the verified rate, even without ID verification. (USDC prize drawings still require verification.)

• New users can do more before verifying. Unverified accounts now earn reduced bonuses (instead of nothing), can comment sooner, and get a clearer picture on the membership page of exactly what they’re earning now vs. what verifying or subscribing would unlock.

• Prize eligibility is now separate from bonus eligibility. The practical upshot: an under-18 user keeps their mana bonuses but can’t enter cash prize drawings — and if entries get voided, the mana is refunded and clearly shown on the prize page.

• Better message when verification is down. If our ID-verification provider is failing, you’ll now see “verification temporarily unavailable” instead of a generic “try again” that you’d retry forever. Huge thank you to the unlucky new user who encountered this and worked with me to debug it.

Prize Drawings

• Status icons on each drawing — see at a glance whether a drawing needs action, is pending payment, or is paid, both in the dropdown and as a top-of-page nag if you have an unclaimed prize.

• Winner notifications now deep-link straight to the exact drawing you won.

• The past-drawings dropdown is restyled by tier, with progressively bolder gold styling for bigger jackpots.

• The /prize page loads instantly now (skeleton placeholders) instead of sitting on a full-page spinner for 10–20s, plus some behind-the-scenes speedups to the chart.

Miscellaneous

• Tidied up the desktop sidebar — About, Referrals, theme, and sign-out now live behind a clean “More” dropdown at the bottom (which is also where Jobs lives).

• Favicons next to external links in comments, descriptions, and posts, so you can see at a glance where a link goes. We also hardened our link-safety checks along the way.

• Filter your balance log by transaction type now (on top of the date filters and pagination we added last time).

• Notification fixes — the group expander, the multi-avatar modal opener, and whole-card tap behavior all work correctly now.

• Push notifications are no longer being delivered to wrong/logged-out accounts on devices where multiple accounts had signed in; each device’s push token now belongs to a single account. This was the #1 culprit for people receiving multiple prize drawing notifications, or not being able to turn them off. Inadvertently improved alt detection, too!

• On mobile, page titles now sit on their own line above the buttons and tabs on the prize, charity, and dashboard pages, so nothing gets cramped.

• The Restricted user badge is now visible to everyone on profiles and hovercards.

• Inline market-mention chips use the white Manifold logo in dark mode now (no more dark-on-dark).

• Checkout no longer goes blank if you have an expired-but-still-active mana offer.

• Mods can unresolve individual answers on numeric/date threshold markets.

• The stats page was stale for ~2 weeks, but the data was always intact. Now fixed; take a look if you wanted to see how we’re doing.

• The “temporary” 2x trader bonuses are still live. The trader bonuses will continue for as long as we see a sustained increase in activity, so if you love the doubled bonuses: create a market.

Finally, if you love Manifold and want to see us thrive, here’s how you can help:

• Register your interest on the jobs board

• Buy merch! After your order ships, you’ll receive a time-sensitive offer to purchase mana at a discount (up to 30% off, 1 redemption per merch item). It would help a ton if you also bought mana.

• Refer your friends! The infrastructure is improved; check it out!

It was a pleasure meeting many of you at Manifest. If I haven’t met you yet, feel free to contact me any time. I love chatting with everyone and would love to hear your compliments, complaints, suggestions, and the rest!

Tod

Unlike group stage games, which had to be resolved with multiple choice markets including the possibility of a draw, we will now have a single team advance from each match. You will be able to trade on any of the remaining games at Manifold’s tournament dashboard, where new matches will automatically propagate in the morning, and where we’ve also curated a number of community markets on the World Cup, from prop bets to pitch invasions.

Canada is a heavy favorite today, with Canadian star Jonathan David — who has been a disappointment in his first club season with Juventus — already having pulled in a hat trick in the group stage at this World Cup.

A big early debate has been the degree to which the host nations will get home-field advantage. While most of the remaining matches will occur in the United States, like today’s match, Canada and Mexico are also host nations, and Mexico historically has registered a significant home-field advantage, perhaps in part due to their elevation. Unfortunately, Mexico’s first match is against Ecuador, one of the only nations that is acclimated to playing in an even higher elevation arena.

The most prominent, public World Cup model, Nate Silver’s PELE model, gives Mexico, the US, and Canada, on average about 100 Elo points for their home field advantage, equivalent to the difference between the top tier of teams like Argentina, France, and Spain and teams like Netherlands, Columbia, or Norway, a few spots below, or alternatively the difference between Mexico/US/Canada and dark horse candidates like Switzerland, Japan, or Morocco, which is part of the reason that Mexico and the US still have over 1% odds to win.

France and Argentina are the two betting market favorites, but you already see some divergence between Elo-based statistical models and the betting markets here.

PELE gives Argentina, at the eve of the knockout round, about a 27% chance of taking home the Cup, a clear favorite. PELE also likes a couple teams with longer odds a little more than prediction markets, giving Colombia about twice as good odds to win it all, and had been giving Norway good odds until their bracket put them in the same R16 section as Brazil and Japan and the same QF as the winner of Mexico/Ecuador/England/DRC. PELE likes other teams, like England and Portugal, less than prediction markets, conversely.

The reigning champs, Argentina, have a great path to the Semifinals, matching up against Cape Verde in the first round, the winner of Australia/Egypt in the second, and then likely Colombia or Switzerland in the QF. The two next-best teams in the tournament, France and Spain, are both on the far side of the bracket. For this reason, Argentina has consistently risen in the rankings over the last week as the shape of the bracket has become clear:

The United States also has a decent path, with perhaps the easiest first round matchup imaginable in Bosnia and Herzegovina (no offense meant to our Bosnian users).

If the US advances, they’d expect to face the winner of Belgium and Senegal in Seattle, which all things considered is about as good of a corner of the bracket as they could hope to find themselves in. The US have decent odds of a QF appearance in sunny Los Angeles, very likely against a slightly underperforming Spanish squad.

You can also bet on tournament awards, like the Golden Boot (top scorer with assists as a tiebreaker), where Messi is already a heavy favorite due to being up two goals over the next highest candidates after the scoring-heavy group stage.

The Golden Glove award goes to the best goalkeeper, as selected by FIFA’s “Technical Study Group”). Argentinian fan favorite from the previous world cup, Emi Martinez, leads there as well.

Finally, the Golden Ball is voted on from a shortlist by media figures, and is essentially the “Finals MVP” of the World Cup.

Unlike on other prediction market platforms, and unlike Elo-based tournament models… on Manifold you can bet on the real issues at the World Cup.

Traders view it as highly likely that we’ll see more ships transit the Strait of Hormuz than goals at the world cup, although this wasn’t the case just a few days ago.

While initially traders thought some sort of political interference in the World Cup schedule was plausible, it now appears very unlikely over the remainder of the tournament.

One enterprising Manifold user is going to try to get into the World Cup Final in New Jersey for under $500:

User “nsokolsky” has written up the following criteria:

Resolves YES if all hold:

• I, or a friend acting as designated proxy, arrive at a matchday access point with a notable concentration of ticket holders bound for the final (Penn Station shuttle queue, Secaucus Junction matchday platform, American Dream Mall walkway, the stadium gates or any equivalent gathering point), no earlier than 1:30 PM ET on July 19 2026, holding no valid ticket

• Between arrival and the start of the second half, I/proxy obtain a ticket through any means: cash to a stranger, guest-entry on someone else’s account, credential transfer, last-minute FIFA release, FIFA Resale Marketplace, StubHub/SeatGeek/Vivid Seats or any other online platform

• Total cash out the door is strictly under $500 USD. This includes ticket price plus all fees, taxes and transfer charges. Foreign currency converts at the spot rate at time of purchase. Free gifts from strangers count as $0

• The QR scans at every required checkpoint and I/proxy walks into the stadium before the start of the second half

• Any seat is fine. Nosebleed, obstructed view, standing room, whatever

Unlike “nsokoslky,” it’s almost guaranteed that another famous American will be in attendance:

Finally, in a surprisingly uncertain market, one creator has given handicaps to teams with worse odds, in a market on which team will score the most goals over the entirety of the World Cup:

Happy Forecasting!

-Above the Fold

The Trump administration believed them! Or at least, someone did. On June 12th, three days after the launch, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Dario Amodei directing Anthropic to suspend access to both models for all foreign nationals, citing national security authorities. The stated reason was a jailbreak that could unlock the cybersecurity capabilities Anthropic had been carefully routing around.

The tip came from an unnamed competitor. The notice was verbal only. No written technical evidence. Anthropic has no nationality verification system, so an order targeting foreign nationals produced, in practice, a global shutdown for everyone.

By that evening, Claude’s landing page read: Fable 5 is temporarily unavailable. This appears to be the first time a government has forced a publicly deployed frontier AI model offline.

The consistency problem is the part I keep coming back to. GPT-5.5, which Anthropic says has the same cybersecurity capabilities, was not touched. The DoD had already classified Anthropic as a supply chain risk to national security in February (a label usually reserved for Huawei), after Anthropic refused to let Claude be used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic filed suit.

Trump later wrote on Truth Social:

Anthropic said no amount of intimidation would change its position. The Fable 5 shutdown arrived five months into that fight, triggered by a tip from an unnamed competitor whose identity nobody has published. Someone should probably ask who.

Anthropic said it plainly:

We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people. If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.

I think this is right. Every frontier model can be jailbroken given sufficient effort. Any competitor can report a jailbreak to a Commerce official. If claimed jailbreaks are sufficient grounds for recall, you have handed a veto over AI development to anyone willing to run a technique and make a phone call. Whether the underlying capability concern is legitimate (to be fair, Fable did seem kinda scary with the little time I had with it) does not change much about how the mechanism here looks.

There is also quite a bit of irony to the classifier situation. Fable 5 launched with classifiers that silently rerouted suspicious queries to Opus 4.8, the older model that remains available. Users almost immediately noticed the classifier triggering on routine greetings. Anthropic apologized and adjusted it on June 11th. The government issued the shutdown order the following evening. Anthropic built safety infrastructure into Fable 5 specifically because Mythos is dangerous enough to require it, and that safety infrastructure publicly quantified just how dangerous Mythos was.

Onto the markets! There are a lot of them.

The most liquid is “Will Fable be reenabled for Americans before June 20?” at 17%

“Will Fable be reenabled for Europeans before July 1?” has moved dramatically since Anthropic’s Managing Director of International Chris Ciauri told a Seoul press conference on Wednesday that they were “very confident that in the coming days, the models will become available again.” That market has gone from 22% to 57%, up 35 points.

The prop bets market on how restoration looks has also shifted. “Fable available with safeguards more stringent than previously, even for Americans” leads at 50%, down from 57%. The two-tier scenario is at 17%.

Separately, someone has created a market asking whether export controls on Fable 5 will be rescinded within 72 hours of GPT 5.6’s release, which sits at 26%. The competitive pressure theory, in other words, has its own market now.

I should mention that Anthropic had just confidentially filed for an IPO when all of this happened, because there is a theory circulating that deserves at least acknowledging. The narrative the shutdown generates, a model so powerful the US government shut it down for national security, is extraordinarily good IPO marketing.

You cannot buy that kind of capability signal. But IPO pricing is about long-term narrative, not a week of token movement, and the administration is so afraid of Claude that they forced it offline is a better founding story than almost anything Anthropic could have written themselves. Whether the shutdown was anticipated, welcomed, or genuinely unwelcome is something only Anthropic knows, but the incentive structure is at least worth being aware of.

What comes after Mythos in the model naming sequence? Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, Fable, Mythos.

There is a market on this, appropriately. Nobody currently knows, and at the moment nobody can access Mythos to ask it.

Happy Forecasting!

- Above the Fold

I want to start with a huge shoutout to @Genzy and @wasabipesto for all of the collaboration, feedback, reviews, and generally just making Manifold a fun place to be (and build). I’ve learned so much from working with our little team, and I love having the freedom and support to experiment here.

Okay, on to the changes.

In this update:

• @ManifoldSports is live — a new official account bringing tournament match markets to Manifold, starting with the 2026 World Cup (first games June 11th).

• Auto-generating, auto-resolving markets — World Cup matchups create themselves as the bracket fills in and resolve to the official result shortly after each match, so you can roll your mana into the next round without waiting on manual resolution.

• Dashboards are back — relaunching with a redesigned 2026 World Cup dashboard, split into an Official tab (Manifold-run match markets with a new card design and in-page betting) and a Community tab (a preview of how dashboards will work site-wide).

• Refreshed Community Guidelines — moved off Notion and onto native site pages, reviewed for accuracy, with a User Guide on the way.

Welcome @ManifoldSports

Okay, @ManifoldSports isn’t a site change, but what can I say, I’m taking some liberties with this piece and slipping it through before anyone says otherwise.

ManifoldSports is our newest official account, bringing official tournament match markets to Manifold. We’re getting started with the World Cup, which kicks off with two games played in Mexico on June 11th. Follow ManifoldSports on the site for updates, announcements, and more.

Auto-Generating and Auto-Resolving Markets

They look the same as other markets on the site, but ManifoldSports World Cup matchups are different from any others we’ve ever created: these markets auto-generate and auto-resolve after the match is played.

When the World Cup starts, 72 matchups (out of 104 total) are already determined. Those games are already up on the site and available for traders to follow (and bet) along. From there, new matches are determined based on the outcomes. ManifoldSports will auto-generate those markets as they are confirmed.

The first 72 matches will resolve either to a winning team or a Draw. Future matches can’t end in a draw, and those markets are generated with only the option to bet on the playing teams. The close time is set with plenty of time for additional gameplay to break the tie.

As you can imagine, manually managing that many markets takes a lot of attention and work. Traders with profits on these games want to be able to take their Mana and put it to work on the next round, so any delays can be really annoying.

These markets will automatically resolve to the official outcome shortly after the game is played.

Dashboards Are Back (Starting With the World Cup)

If you’re newer here, you may not know Manifold once had Dashboards. If you’ve been around a while, you might (like me!) have missed them. Either way, they’re back! They’re limited for now, but it’s a start.

At the moment, the only one is the 2026 World Cup dashboard, and it has two tabs: Official and Community. They look and behave a little differently from each other and from the rest of the site, so here’s what to expect from each.

Official Tab

This tab holds Manifold’s own match markets, all created and managed by ManifoldSports (with support from the Admin and Mod teams), with a brand-new card design built just for the tournament.

Layout: matches are grouped by date, then sorted by kickoff time, which you’ll see in the top-right of each card. Every card shows live probabilities and market volume at a glance.

Your positions: if you hold one, the card footer updates to show it. A solid pip means at least one position; an open pip means at least one open limit order. Hover for the details.

Betting in place: there’s a redesigned betting modal that opens right on the dashboard. From it you can move between the match outcomes, switch between Yes and No, and place a bet or limit order — all without leaving the page.

Or do it the classic way: the markets themselves haven’t changed, so you can click the match title, the “view market →” link, or the position hovercard to go straight to the full market page.

One thing that’s different: played matches don’t pile up. Once a market resolves, it sinks below the open ones — first into a Recent section, then into Past Games after about 12 hours. You can always scroll down to find resolved markets; you just won’t have to push past them to see what’s still live.

Community Tab

The Community tab is meant to feel more familiar, so the cards stay close to what you see elsewhere on the site, with a few tweaks: they’re resized to fit two across, carry a market-type label in the top right corner, show a chart illustration on numeric markets, and display a positions pill in the bottom-right (with a hovercard) when you hold a position or have an open limit order. As elsewhere on the site, the whole card is clickable and takes you to the market page.

Sorting works a little differently on the Community tab. Resolved markets still sink, but they drop straight into a Past section rather than passing through an interim stage. You also get a few sort options, and this tab accepts all market types — with Polls grouped at the top in a section you can collapse to tuck them away. We wanted polls to stay visible without getting lost among, or mixed into, the regular market cards.

This tab is also our model for where Dashboards are headed: it’s the template we plan to refine and then roll out more widely, eventually letting users build their own. So if you’ve got thoughts on the layout or behavior, comment to let me know. You may help shape the future of Dashboards on the site.

Community Guidelines Refresh

With all respect to Notion, it was time for the Community Guidelines to move on to purpler pastures.

We not only reviewed the content to ensure everything there reflects the current state of Manifold, but we’ve officially created pages on the site for all of that information to live.

Now, when you click the Community Guidelines link, you’ll land on a hub for a variety of pages covering all sorts of details on how the site works, what Moderators do, the ins and outs of participating in Prize Drawings, and a lot more.

The next step is to create a User Guide (there’s a loose starting point in the pages right now) that will offer some insights like best practices, advice on creating interesting markets with legible criteria, and that sort of thing. Have something you think belongs in the User Guide, or the Community Guidelines? Something in there that could be more clear? Let me know!

-Stef

When Above the Fold last covered the pretty-darn-important California primaries, Eric Swalwell had just dropped out and Tom Steyer was a heavy favorite to win the governor’s election, looking likely to advance to the runoff against CA Republican mainstay Steve Hilton.

Becerra has since risen steadily to the point that he’s a heavy favorite to win, even more so if Steyer fails to make the runoff tonight.

Most of Steyer’s hopes reside in making the runoff alongside Becerra, rather than winning the first round. This scenario, which is actually quite plausible, would lock Republicans out of the race.

As a forecaster, I greedily hope this happens; a Becerra-Hilton runoff would be fairly predictable, with markets likely to trade around 97-3 or something, for most of the year, barring another inconceivable scandal.

However, a Steyer-Becerra runoff would be tricky to forecast. Steyer is running to the left of Becerra, but not by much. Steyer would also be the anti-establishment candidate, and he’s a billionaire to boot. A successful businessman might be an easier sell for the ~1/3 of California voters that lean Republican.

Los Angeles

Meanwhile, in the LA mayoral election, Raman has slipped from first place to third in the last month, though the polling remains really close.

Here again we have the potential for some interesting runoffs. If Raman can beat out Pratt and make it to a runoff against Bass, it’s unclear whether her progressive bona fides will help or hurt her. The LA voter base is even more left-leaning than California’s at large, but at the same time, Raman doesn’t have the same ability to pivot to the center as Steyer might.

To complicate matters, basically any runoff combination appears possible here. Raman-Pratt would yield the most fireworks, locking Bass out of reelection, although markets give this only about an 8% chance of occurring.

Pelosi’s Seat

In what was once a competitive race, Weiner is all but guaranteed to win first in the jungle primary tonight.

Pelosi, for her part, had endorsed Connie Chan, but voters don’t seem to care, and Chan is in a struggle with Chakrabarti for second place, taking one of them to a runoff in November to decide who goes to Congress.

The actual election is in slightly more doubt. Chan and Chakrabarti are betting that they can win over non-primary voters by the fall, or perhaps erode Wiener’s lead.

But they face an uphill battle. Wiener is already polling somewhere around 40%, ahead of his nearest competitor by double digits, and Wiener is a savvy political operator who can point to a number of accomplishments in his time in office in the CA legislature, including a much-hyped bill on AI safety that was vetoed by Gov Newsom.

NY-12

Speaking of AI safety proponents entering Congress, Alex Bores is slightly trailing Micah Lasher in the primary race for NY’s twelfth Congressional seat.

Schlossberg, in another loss for the “endorsed by Pelosi” faction, appears likely to lose in the primary. The race is likely a bellwether for how much the public cares about AI right now, with Bores emerging as an anti-AI-company champion, commensurate with heavy spending against him from the Leading the Future PAC.

Maine

Remember how Janet Mills suspended her campaign in the Senate primary, basically handing the race to Platner, who had had >99% odds to win the race just a few days ago?

Welp… yet another scandal has plunged Platner into the national eye, this time for sexting women other than his wife. While the Nazi tattoo and years of questionable forum posts may have not been the nail in the coffin for many voters, it’s possible that the mounting scandals could cast Platner as a liar or a narcissist in the eyes of voters, making them reevaluate previous allegations in a different light. The Democrats do not want a near lock in the Maine senate race to erode into a competitive race, where they’re forced to spend large sums defending an indefensible candidate. Platner’s odds have slipped from nearly 80% down to 60% in the general election, these last few days:

The primary isn’t for another week, so there’s perhaps a tiny crack in the door for Mills to mount a preference cascade comeback.

Iowa

Finally, remember that contentious Senate primary in Iowa? Well… the polling has completely flipped in the last month, with centrist Josh Turek pulling ahead of progressive Zach Wahls.

Turek, widely considered more competitive in a general election than Wahls, will make this race to succeed the retiring Senator Ernst a close one. Currently, Turek has almost 40% odds to win this fall, which might all but decide control of the Senate!

Indeed, Iowa is the second-most likely state to be the tipping point Senate seat, after Ohio.

Roundup

Colombia’s presidential election appears likely to surface another shocking far-right victory in South America. The relative unknown entity, Abelardo de la Espriella, is heavily favored in prediction markets over leftist Ivan Cepeda. De la Espriella just placed ahead of Cepeda in the first round, with runoffs to follow in less than a month.

Here again we see a big divergence between polling and prediction markets. Polling has Cepeda as a very narrow favorite going into the runoff, while prediction markets are mostly skeptical of that lead. The third place candidate was a moderate right-wing candidate, making it complex to determine where her voters will settle in the runoff.

Across the pond, the French Open will crown a new champion, with favorites Sinner and Djokovic already out in the early rounds. Alexander Zverev, the only player left who has made a Grand Slam final, won his match this morning, leaving six rivals remaining in the other 3/4 of the bracket.

Happy Forecasting!

-Above the Fold

The markets had priced in the shock, but the political consequences were still drastic.

Within days, 95 Labour MPs had signed letters calling on Starmer to resign or set out a timetable for departure. 103 others signed a counter-letter saying now was “no time for a leadership contest.” According to LabourList’s running tracker, 159 MPs support Starmer, 97 want him gone, and 147 have taken no public position.

Markets give 20% odds Starmer exits before July, but 72% he exits in 2026.

Keir Starmer went on a round of regional TV interviews, compared Andy Burnham’s economic proposals to Liz Truss, said he would “lead from the front,” and is still in Downing Street. The comparison perhaps tells us more about the attacker’s anxieties than the target’s economics: Burnham’s prospectus involves devolution and place-based investment, which is alot of things, but meaningfully isn’t a Truss-adjacent position. The comparison was likely designed to trigger bond market anxiety about a potential leadership contests, markets, which, as opposed to the court of public opinion, have been relatively favourable to Starmer and Reeves.

Wes Streeting resigned as Health Secretary on May 14th. His letter:

“Where we need vision, we have a vacuum. Where we need direction, we have drift.”

He had, according to a source close to him, the numbers to trigger a formal contest. He decided not to. The stated reason was an “orderly timetable.” I find this hard to take at face value, because there is no orderly timetable: there is Makerfield on June 18th, and whatever comes after it. The more plausible explanation is straightforward: triggering a contest now means fighting it against a candidate who isn’t in parliament yet and losing to Andy Burnham before Burnham has taken a single Commons vote would be a career-defining outcome, and not in a good way. Waiting on the other hand, costs little-to-nothing and keeps options open. Every Labour rival seems to have reached a similar calculation, which is perhaps the only reason Starmer still sits in Number 10.

Markets give Streeting a 13% chance of being the next Labour leader post-Starmer.

YouGov’s poll of Labour members is a good reflection on the situation, although nuanced. 66% of Labour members think Starmer has done a good job as Prime Minister. 57% think Streeting was wrong to resign. And yet 61% want Starmer to stand down before the next election, only 28% think Labour would win in 2029 with him as leader, and 47% rank Burnham as their first preference. To be fair to the man, members do think he’s governing competently. However, they have also concluded that this doesn’t really matter. The party famous for treating electibility as the highest pedestal for candidacy has reached the conclusion that it’s current leader, regardless of performing fairly reasonably, is an electoral liability significant enough to justify the disruption of replacing him midterm.

Streeting would lose to Starmer among members by 65% to 15%, which is a difficult number to build a leadership campaign around. He has since committed to rejoining the EU, staking out the exact position Burnham just walked back (more on this later).

Josh Simons resigned as MP for Makerfield on the same day as Streeting, explicitly stating that this was with the intention to create a path for Burnham to return to Westminster. Simons had himself resigned from ministerial positions in February after a scandal involving the investigation of journalists who had published unfavourable coverage of a think tank he ran, linked falsely to pro-Russian propaganda. His resignation statement said he was “putting the people I represent and the country I love first.”

The NEC, having blocked Burnham from standing in Gorton and Denton in January by eight votes to one (Starmer voted against), approved his candidacy on May 15th. Burnham was confirmed as Labour’s candidate on May 19th after no other names were put forward for local selection. He is the first figure to be given a parliamentary seat specifically to mount a leadership challenge since the 1965 Leyton by-election, where the Labour candidate with a similar game-plan lost in a shock victory by 205 votes. Whether that is a comforting or uncomfortable precedent is dependent.

Steve Richards on Newsnight called it “the most significant by-election in post-war British history.” Channel 4 went with “arguably the most important by-election in living memory.”

Keir Starmer has pledged to campaign for Burnham in Makerfield. Burnham, upon hearing this, was reportedly not ecstatic. Guido Fawkes has taken to calling him “Angry Burnham.” The arrangement, with two men publicly campaigning while one is attempting to replace the other, has little obvious precedent. But Kier has had worse weeks.

On paper, Makerfield is not a seat Labour should be competitive in right now. It voted 65% Leave in 2016. The 2021 census puts it well to the right of the national average economically, and considerably further right culturally. At the 2024 general election, Reform took 34%, fifteen points behind Labour, in what was supposed to be a safe seat. At the May 7th council elections, Reform swept all eight Makerfield wards with around 50% of the vote against Labour’s 27%.

John Curtice gives Labour less than 5% chance without Burnham. Survation puts it quite literally at zero. With Burnham, Survation’s most recent poll (fieldwork May 18-22) has Labour on 43%, Reform on 40%, Restore Britain on 7%, Lib Dems on 4%, Greens on 3%, and Conservatives on 2%.

Reform’s candidate is Robert Kenyon: self-employed plumber, born in the constituency, former Army reservist, NHS technician through the pandemic, finished second in 2024 with 31.8%. Nigel Farage has pledged to “throw absolutely everything” at the campaign. The Monster Raving Loony Party is also standing, represented by Howling Laud Hope, a publican from Fleet who has contested more than thirty by-elections and has led the party since the death of Screaming Lord Sutch in 1999.

The Green candidate withdrew after nine hours citing personal reasons, with Caroline Lucas subsequently urging the Greens not to field a replacement, on the grounds that Burnham's support for electoral reform "could transform our democracy." A replacement candidate was announced this week regardless.

Markets currently give Labour 64% and Reform 30%, with Restore at 5% and the Greens at 1.2% following the candidate instability. The Reform number has compressed since the market first opened, falling from around 40% as Burnham’s candidacy became more tangible and the risk of vote-splitting from the Greens reduced.

On a side-tangent here, there is a broader pattern across recent by-elections, where Green and Reform candidates (specifically elected ones) have been withdrawing at a striking rate, often because their campaigns based on foreign policy positions and broader geopolitical goals end up materialising to the reality of the job - bin collection & social care budgets, with the parties on a vicious cycle of replacement. While the flanks are certainty generating a significant amount of energy for British politics, they are learning that governing is a vastly different discipline from campaigning.

To understand why Makerfield matters beyond the question of the immediate leadership challenge, you have to understand the basis of Burnham’s political argument.

His diagnosis of Britain’s political failure is not primarily about Labour or the north. It is about the centralised state. He calls his approach “Manchesterism”: the idea that the last forty years of top-down Westminster policy broke the linkage bridging economic growth and public welfare, and the way to restore that balance is to devolve power and resources to city regions that understand what they govern.

“We need to feel the national state at the back of the local state,”

he told the Institute for Government in January.

“In effect what we find ourselves doing is fighting it all of the time in an attritional battle.”

His critique of HM Treasury is personal: he was a Treasury minister in 2007 when northern rail investment was blocked because it failed the Green Book economic test. The test was designed to evaluate returns in a high-density, high-productivity London economy. The north, obviously, and by design, failed it and the funding went elsewhere..

The Bee Network acts as his proof of concept. Greater Manchester brought its bus services back under local authority control after decades of privatisation. The regulated system now runs a third cheaper per kilometre than its privatised predecessor, with a £2 fare cap. Burnham points to this as evidence that public and local control acts as an essential pre-requisite for growth rather than a reward for it.

His broader programme, outlined at the Cambridge Bennett School in March, involves the same logic but applied nationally: reform HM’s Treasury, devolve housing and skills from national agencies like Homes England and Skills England to local council authorities, replace FPTP with proportional representation, abolish the House of Lords in favour of an elected Senate representing the nations and regions, and remove the whip system from MPs.

Little of this is based on Brexit and immigration. This is vital to understand when approaching Burnhamism.

Makerfield voted 65% Leave. Robert Kenyon, Reform’s candidate, is a local plumber and Army reservist who is also running on the premise that Westminster has failed this community. The difference in both candidates is the diagnosis of that failure. Burnham says the failure was inherently structural: forty years of centralised economic policy that extracted value from places like Makerfield rather than investing in them. Kenyon and Reform say the failure was cultural and demographic: immigration, the erosion of traditional industry and “British identity”, and a political class that stopped speaking the language of the people who built this country. Both men are running against the same Westminster, but has contrary accounts of what exactly its failure was.

At the Labour conference last year, Burnham said he wanted to rejoin the EU within his lifetime. Last week he announced he was “not proposing that the UK considers rejoining the EU” and that the country should not “rerun those arguments.” Hours later, his team confirmed he would stick with Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules, after financial markets had taken fright at earlier signals he might not. In the New Statesman, Burnham had said: “We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets.”

Farage’s “will the real Andy Burnham please stand up” is designed to frame this as incoherence. I think the more interesting reading is that these are two separate capitulations to two separate pressures that have nothing to do with the central argument he is making. The EU reversal is him standing in a 65% Leave seat and deciding that relitigating Brexit is not the ground he wants to fight on. The fiscal rules reversal is him discovering that the markets will move against any Labour leader who signals loose spending, and that governing requires accommodation with that constraint. This is not Manchesterism failing, but rather it encountering the parts of British political reality is might have not been designed to address.

The deeper question, which the Bennett School paper raises and nobody in the current political conversation is really engaging with, is whether Manchesterism can survive contact with Downing Street at all. Blair came into office committed to devolution and ended up with a centralised Sure Start programme run from Whitehall, which came crashing down post-2008. Cameron came into the policy with promised radical localism but delivered a top-down austerity programme administered through local government. The view from Downing Street, as the Bennett School puts it, has a tendency to alter perspectives on central control. Burnham’s entire platform is built on dismantling Westminster orthodoxy. The paradox at the heart of it is that he has to acquire the vast levers of the British state in order to devolve them, and the history books says this is harder than it looks.

If Burnham wins on June 18th, he is required under the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 to resign as Mayor of Greater Manchester, triggering another by-election. He will need 81 MPs to formally trigger a leadership contest. Given the parliamentary arithmetic and the 59% of Labour members who would back him over Starmer in a direct contest, that threshold looks achievable. The contest would be Labour’s first since 2020.

Markets give a 65% chance that Burnham wins the by-election, an astonishing 50% chance that he is PM in 2027, pricing the gap at a mere 15 points.

However, if Burnham loses, the crisis would not only fail to resolve but get intrinsically messier. The 97 MPs who want Starmer gone don’t disappear, the 61% of members who want him out before 2029 will likely not change their minds. What does change, however, is that the most compelling alternative would have been removed, and Labour’s internal crisis would have no obvious solution.

A Reform win in Makerfield would do more than end a candidacy. If Reform can beat the most personally popular Labour politician in the country, running on his home ground, in the seat his party created a by-election specifically to give him, then the 2029 projections of Reform dominance start becoming more tangible.

Either way, Britain is about to have its sixth Prime Minister in ten years, or it isn’t, and the question will be settled by a by-election in Greater Manchester that was triggered specifically because a sitting Prime Minister blocked his most dangerous rival from standing anywhere else.

Happy Forecasting!

- Above the Fold

Last week, @Genzy brought us a limited-time run of doubled unique trader bonuses! This is a great time to make new markets and recoup some of those costs. I went ahead and made a market I had been thinking about recently, and I’ve already received M390 in trader bonuses. And don’t forget: you can make one small market for free every week via the quest bonuses!

Genzy says he’ll probably turn it off on Monday, but the markets think he might leave it on a bit longer. You can also bet on how much extra mana will be distributed as part of this promo here:

New Sort & Filter

So many markets are basically decided already, resting at 90-95% for months before resolution. Boring! How do you find the interesting, uncertain ones that haven’t been settled yet?

Starting this week, you can use the new options for finding markets far from the extremes. The Uncertain filter option only shows binary markets with probabilities between 30-70%, which is very nice when combined with a sort like 24-hour volume. And the new Mid % sort option orders all markets by how close they are to 50%, which is amazing when paired with filters like liquidity and close date.

Block Yourself

That’s right, you can now block yourself from trading in your own market.

Why would you want to do this? Well, if you had a market about something really subjective, you might want to say, “To remain unbiased, I promise not to hold any shares in this market.” But traders may still be concerned that you’ll swoop in at the last second, place a huge bet, and misresolve the market to make a ton of profit.

Now there’s a button on the market info card that lets you publicly prevent yourself from trading on that market. You’ll see a confirmation box that explains that it can’t be undone except by a moderator or admin, and if you continue, you’ll see a nice green box on your market that tells everyone you’ve committed.

If you still have any shares or profit in the market, that’s fine; it’ll be shown in that box for users to check. I think it will generally be best practice to sell all shares before hitting this button, but I decided not to make it force a liquidation since there are still valid reasons for users to hold shares, but pledge not to buy or sell any more.

I hope this becomes a signal for users to find high-quality, trustworthy markets more easily and reduce opportunities for the bad kind of shenanigans. Feel free to request that creators use this before you bet in a market!

Colors

For multiple-choice questions, you can now select any color by using a hex code!

For a while, you’ve been able to pick colors for each answer of a multiple-choice market from a list, but this week we added a field where you can enter any hex code to use a fully-custom color. Now you can use real NVIDIA Green (#76b900) or Claude Orange (#d97757) for your markets! As a bonus, we also applied these to the special 2-answer MC/binary markets, so you can now customize the colors of those markets the same way.

Personalized Mana Offers

After your merch order ships, you’ll get a notification (and a pulsing badge on the Get Mana button) for a time-limited offer: up to 30% off your next purchase of M$5,000. The offer lives for 72 hours, shows a countdown on the offer card, and works with both card and crypto checkout. If you don’t want it, hit “Dismiss”. The chip stays around so you can un-dismiss if you change your mind; it doesn’t pause the timer.

If you have had difficulty ordering merch, try again! We have made several improvements and fixed a few bugs that were blocking some people.

Referral Payouts

Referral payouts are fixed and now split into two events. A regression from early April was silently blocking new referral payments, so referrers got nothing when their referred user signed up. Now:

• M$250 when the referred user places their first non-API bet

• M$1,000 when they complete iDenfy verification

So you get something even if your referral never finishes verification, and the extra M$1,000 when they do. The Referrals page now shows the actual amount paid per referral plus badges: “Verify pending” while the verify leg is still outstanding, “N× boost” if your supporter multiplier applied, and “?” for referrals that haven’t earned yet. A backfill script has been run for users whose referrals fell through the bug window.

We are constantly taking steps to detect abuse, but of course, if you notice anything suspicious, please let us know. Using referrals to create your own alt accounts will lead to fines or further punishment — don’t do it!

Trading Log UI

Have you been annoyed at seeing dozens (or hundreds) of tiny limit orders filling up the trade logs? Bots use these types of orders to manage their positions, but it can be difficult to sift through and understand what’s going on. This week, we pushed a few features to help you humans understand the trade log better.

First, we added a button to hide all trades made via the API. This will hide all bot trades and anything else not made directly from the official website or apps. If you would rather just filter out the tiny orders, you can use the older Amount option to see trades above, say, M$100.

As a bonus, I’ve also added those filters to the Trades tab of the live page. I love having that page open on a second monitor to just watch trades flow by like a waterfall (and definitely not so I can snipe-fade random bets).

We also simplified the text of each trade in the log a bit. Now you can easily distinguish the orders that actually executed; those trades will clearly indicate how much was actually spent versus the maximum. All orders now also include a consistent field that shows if it’s open, filled, expired, or cancelled.

Miscellaneous

• You’ll see time zones displayed in a few more places, namely the market page info box and market creation page, where you set the close time. We always used your local timezone for these, but it was never super clear. You can now also set a specific close time on the market creation page.

• The balance log got a little love this week. For those of you who place tons of bets, it was getting a little hard to navigate, so we added pagination in addition to the date filters to help you track your balance better. When you go to search, we load the next 20 pages to make sure we find the transaction you’re looking for (though we should search the server instead).

• We increased the padding of some buttons, such as the “back” button in the top left of the post page. We also made some other buttons more consistent, like the DM and settings buttons on the profile page. Consistency!

• We did some work to try to speed up the prize page loading this week. I don’t actually think this fixed it, though. Someone should make a market about this.

• I decided to change the default date market type from buckets (where you bet on individual dates or ranges) to thresholds (where you bet on if it happens before/after a date). Both have their uses, but I think thresholds are usually more intuitive for most situations. Yell at me in the comments if you think I’m wrong!

• Last time I mentioned a new API validation for bot comments, checking that replyToCommentId exists. Our database expects that this is the ID of the top-level comment since our comment threads aren’t deeply nested. The API now enforces this instead of silently eating your comment.

• Errors for “Maker has insufficient balance” should be much less likely. When you place a bet on a dependent multiple-choice market, we now check limit orders on other answers and cancel them if they would be filled, and the user doesn’t have enough mana to back it.

• We added a document outlining our responsible security disclosure procedures to the GitHub repository. The document is just a recap of our existing procedure, now in a better location.

• The stats page now uses query navigation between tabs so you can link to a particular one.

• The cool sprout hat we give to new users was falling off their heads sometimes, so we added some superglue to make sure it stays perfectly centered over their avatar.

Thanks for reading! For those of you in the US, have a nice Memorial Day weekend!

-wasabipesto

Fields Medalist Tim Gowers wrote the companion paper:

“If a human had written the paper and submitted it to the Annals of Mathematics and I had been asked for a quick opinion, I would have recommended acceptance without any hesitation.”

OpenAI got this wrong once already. Thomas Bloom, who maintains the Erdős Problems website, called an October 2025 OpenAI claim “a sharp misrepresentation.” Bloom is present alongside this result. Gowers wrote a companion paper. I think the excitement is warranted.

Markets give 79% odds that AI will solve any important mathematical conjecture before January 1st, 2030.

Whether yesterday’s result resolves that market depends on how the creator reads “important” : Erdős Problems are about as prestigious as it gets in combinatorics, and Gowers is saying Annals without hesitation.

First Proof

In February, eleven mathematicians from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, and EPFL published a challenge they called “First Proof”: ten unpublished research lemmas drawn from their own ongoing work, available to AI systems for one week before the answers were released. None of the problems had appeared in any training dataset and that was seemingly the point.

Without restrictions, GPT-5.2 Pro and Gemini 3.0 Deep Think produced confident proofs for all ten problems. Two held up under expert review. Scientific American ran the headline: “The verdict, it seems, is in: artificial intelligence is not about to replace mathematicians.”

That was February 14th. The Erdős result was announced May 20th.

I don’t think these are actually in tension. First Proof tested whether AI could reliably solve a broad, uncurated sample of research-level problems with no direction, no particular reason to expect the problems to fall within whatever the model is capable of. The Erdős result was a specific, famous, intensively studied problem surrounded by decades of mathematical literature. The model wasn’t working blind: it had encountered every approach anyone had tried across its training data. Producing convincing nonsense across a diverse range of fields is a different failure mode from finding an unexpected connection within a domain saturated with relevant signalling.

Markets give 54% odds that an AI will co-author a mathematics research paper published in a reputable journal before the end of 2026, up 10 points recently.

Whether that market is pricing AI capability or academic gatekeeping is rather unclear. I’d also be curious what that market would price if the question specified “without meaningful human scaffolding,” because OpenAI’s First Proof submission involved a weeklong sprint of human-AI collaboration with errors already found in the result. And whether that’s co-authorship or heavily assisted human authorship is a also a question the market hasn’t quite settled.

The First Proof team has announced a second batch of problems. I think this is the more interesting benchmark to watch right now, partly because it’s adversarial in the right way and partly because the second batch will presumably be designed with knowledge of how AI systems approached the first.

The IMO

Markets give 70% odds on a perfect score being achieved by an AI model at the 2026 IMO. I think this is roughly right, maybe slightly generous.

In 2025, both OpenAI and DeepMind achieved gold medals at 35/42. A perfect score is 42/42. Problems 3 and 6 are categorically harder than the rest of the paper. Fewer than 10% of human contestants solve them, and twenty-six humans scored better than either AI last year. The gap between gold and perfect is not a numerical gap. Gold means you solved five of six problems that the world’s best high school mathematicians spent 4.5 hours on. Perfect means you solved them all, including the two that stumped 90% of those students.

The bull case is that DeepMind could train a specialized system specifically targeting IMO 2026, as they did with AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry. Specialized systems have historically outperformed general models on structured competition math by substantial margins. The bear case is that Problems 3 and 6 require genuinely novel proof techniques, closer in character to First Proof than to the kind of structured reasoning current models handle well.

The open-source version sits at 44%. The labs most likely to build a specialized system for IMO 2026 are not the ones who open-source it afterward, and the 24-point gap is roughly the market's price for that constraint.

90 and 19

Two numbers sit oddly against each other in this cluster.

90% on whether AI will produce an Annals-quality paper for $100k by March 2030. Gowers just said he would send the Erdős proof to the Annals without hesitation. This market is up 24 points recently and feels directionally right, perhaps even slightly conservative.

19% on whether AI will outperform humans in all mathematical research areas by 2028,.

I don’t think these are inconsistent, though the gap is real. Producing an Annals-quality paper on a specific famous problem and outperforming human mathematicians as a practice are different things. The Erdős conjecture had been worked on for nearly eighty years - it came preloaded with context, partial results, and a research community that had already significantly narrowed the solution space. Knowing which problems are worth that kind of attention, before anyone else does, is also a significant part of the profession.

As someone who’s yet to have a strong background in mathematics, I lack the ability to truly appreciate the scale of the achievement, but I found Gowers’s comments in the full companion paper to be perhaps the most representative take on where the mathematics community truly stands (among those who haven’t got their heads too far up their own arses to seriously ponder the question).

I find myself not only trying to assess what AI has achieved in this particular case, but also thinking more generally about how such assessments can possibly be made. Can we still identify some mathematical capability that human mathematicians have and AI does not yet have? If so, what might that capability be, and how could one go about demonstrating that AI still lacks it?

Almost certainly the answer to the first question will have to be quantitative rather than qualitative. That is, we are unlikely to be able to show that there is something we can do that current AI models cannot in principle do at all, but we might be able to show that there are things we can still do much more efficiently than those models. But when a model has just solved a major open problem, it is clear that even a modest conclusion like that will not be straightforward to demonstrate, and indeed isn’t obviously true.

I think (for what little my perspective may be worth on assessing a Fields medalist on his carefully selected beliefs on the notion), that this is the right frame of thought. Too often the question gets lost in categorically useless philosophical waffle that sounds profound and gets you precisely nowhere: whether the models are "really thinking," and whether they're "truly creative." None of that matters for working out what they can actually do. What matters is whether they can match or surpass human effort on the same problems, assessed quantitatively. Gowers then goes on to conclude:

In any case, there is no doubt that the solution to the unit-distance problem is a milestone in AI mathematics... Furthermore, even if it is correct that AI cannot yet find a proof that needs a long hint sequence, such proofs are very difficult to find for humans as well, so in the unlikely event that progress in AI mathematics does suddenly stall, we have still probably entered an era where it will become very difficult for humans to compete with AI at solving mathematical problems.

The 19% market is probably best read in this light. It isn’t pricing whether AI will be able to do specific impressive things (as that question is largely settled). But more so an attempt to understand whether the full practice of mathematical research, selection included, gets displaced. Gowers is saying even a stall in AI progress would leave us in an era where human competition with AI on problem-solving is very difficult.

The chess comparison is what most reach for, and there’s a market: 12% on research-level mathematics becoming a sport akin to chess before 2035.

Engines have been superhuman at chess since Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997. Chess didn’t die. Players use engines for preparation, opening theory expanded, the quality of human play improved. A 2025 PNAS paper found that AlphaZero’s internal representations contained concepts grandmasters could learn, machine knowledge transferring back to humans quantifiably. Whether mathematics follows the same path is unclear. There’s no Elo rating for being a mathematician, and “akin to chess” probably requires human mathematical practice to reorganise around AI tools the way chess preparation reorganised around engines, which is a higher bar than AI producing messy proofs on famous problems. I’d price 12% a few points higher, but I understand the hesitation.

The market on whether the next Millennium Problem will be solved by an AI lab or a mathematics department has had AI lab as favourite since January.

AI lab sits at 58%, and the small recent uptick looks like an underreaction given the week. The Millennium Problems are a different category from anything above: seven problems, $1 million prize each, one solved in history. Grigori Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture in 2003 and turned down the million dollars and the Fields Medal. If a model cracks the Riemann Hypothesis, presumably someone will be available to collect.

Happy Forecasting!

- Above the Fold

On one hand, most professional forecasters agree with mainstream health organizations that hantavirus is not as serious of a threat as the media has made it out to be. Top forecaster Peter Wildeford wrote an excellent piece on this called “Hantavirus won’t be the next COVID,” breaking down exactly that. Primarily, the epidemiology of the disease does not lend itself to pandemic potential:

…critically, the infectious window of hantavirus is short and centered on visible illness. Andes virus infectiousness peaks on the same day a patient develops fever and drops sharply within days. Unlike COVID, pre-symptomatic transmission is minimal. By the time someone is contagious enough to seed a superspreading event, they look sick with a fever — which is why isolation works at all. This is the profile of a virus public health can contain.

On the other hand, many other pundits agree with the cottage industry of blogger virologists that hantavirus is quite worrisome because of what it says about how the world is coordinating around risky outbreaks. If hantavirus had slightly higher human-to-human spread, we could be in a very different world. There still might be a couple passengers from the ship unaccounted for, and over the last week there still have been breaches in quarantine in certain nations that would be problematic in a disease with a slightly higher reproduction number.

Matt Yglesias, in his piece titled “Hantavirus is a reminder we should prepare for the next pandemic,” writes:

I checked with knowledgeable medical professionals and none of them seem especially worried about this particular hantavirus outbreak, which is great. But when I start to see headlines telling people not to panic, I get worried.

Not because you should panic about hantavirus, but because panicking is — by definition — not the correct response to any situation. If you’re facing an imminent threat, you still shouldn’t panic because panicking is never correct. So by the same token, while it’s good to hear that the objective threat level from this outbreak is by most accounts lower than I initially feared, just issuing instructions not to panic doesn’t add very much.

The implication is that everyone should just continue going about their day without changing anything. And it’s possible that’s correct advice for you and your family.

But my sense is that most American households have in fact under-reacted to the threat of novel virus outbreaks (which is perhaps why companies making well-reviewed respirators go out of business). And it’s definitely the case that the American government has under-reacted.

I think both of these takes are essentially correct. Individual American citizens almost certainly shouldn’t panic about hantavirus, but world health agencies absolutely should be jumping the gun to throw any resources they can at stopping things like the current hantavirus outbreak, especially in the first few days when its etiology and transmission dynamics were more hazy. Markets hold that there’s nearly a 1 in 3 chance of a global pandemic in the next 3.5 years! If there’s even a whiff of something that has pandemic potential, they shouldn’t hesitate to throw billions of dollars of resources at an outbreak. The base rate is roughly 10% per year, with the last two being COVID-19 and H1N1, otherwise known as swine flu.

Hantavirus will probably not be this pandemic, however. The Manifold market on a hantavirus pandemic this year has consistently been trading below 5%, several points below its Polymarket mirror.

Manifold has a lower discount rate than Polymarket since the uses of Mana off the platform are considerably lower than the use of dollars off Polymarket. Even with this, the market might be overselling the likelihood of a Pandemic, which I’d personally price at around 1% or lower. Take a look at the largest shareholders:

Brad, the largest NO holder, is 9th in profit all-time on Manifold, and users Chad, Agh, and yours truly also make the profit leaderboard (you might also notice YouTuber “Rational Animations” as the third largest YES holder, “Writer”). No one on the YES side can say the same.

Getting a market down below 3-5% with asymmetric profit incentives can be challenging. When you see headlines like “prediction markets give X (thing happening in many months) a 3/5/10% chance,” this is something to keep in mind as an interpretative artifact!

Traders think there’s only about a 1 in 2 chance that even a single non-passenger will contract hantavirus from the MV Hondius outbreak. Surprisingly, the outbreak has still been limited to passengers and crew on the ship.

I’m not sure why this market spiked recently from where it was trading at around 30%, but perhaps it has to do with the MV Hondius finally docking at port in the Netherlands.

A couple people have raised the possibility that the hantavirus outbreak on the ship didn’t necessarily exhibit any human-to-human spread, with passengers on the ship perhaps all being contaminated by excreta of a rat or rats on the ship (the disease is spread by the “colilargo,” otherwise known as the long-tailed pygmy rice rat). Traders think this thesis — or rather, that convincing evidence supporting this thesis will emerge — is unlikely, at just 12%.

It still may take a few weeks for the outbreak to run its course if it does continue to spread. A market on the last confirmed case gives >20% to a case after June 18th, for example:

Are scientists busy working on a vaccine? Possibly! After some volatile price action, it seems that traders believe there’s around a 30% chance that a hantavirus vaccine is trialed in humans by the end of next year.

An OSTP report found that it would only cost in the ballpark of $26 billion to prepare mRNA vaccines against each of the known 26 families of viruses that can infect humans. That sounds like a lot but it would be pennies on the dollar if they were effective against even a single future pandemic, possibly saving the US trillions in avoiding shutdowns and lowering healthcare expenditures alone, through expeditious vaccine development.

It seems quite plausible that health agencies or international funders take this hantavirus outbreak seriously enough to preemptively do at least a Phase 1 trial in humans.

Despite low chance of a pandemic, this hantavirus outbreak could still be bad! There’s a marginally higher chance that the WHO could label it as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern if things get worse, and it seems distinctly possible that public outcry or pressure might lead them to do this, counterintuitively, regardless of the actual epidemiological risks.

Keep in mind that there’s a base rate of about a 1 in 3 chance of any PHEIC in a given year, as these things happen fairly regularly. In fact, they happen so regularly that while writing the draft of this newsletter, one happened, kind of out of the blue!

The recent ebola outbreak may have now eclipsed hantavirus! A few rumored cases of ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo rapidly turned into a fully-fledged outbreak over the weekend, with the WHO scrambling to account for why this happened under the radar. Perhaps health agencies were focused on hantavirus? Perhaps the U.S. distancing themselves from global health organizations played a role? This variant of ebola is not the slightly more common Zaire strain, but rather the closely related Bundibugyo strain, which complicated early testing results, confusing global health workers and putting a slight delay in the response.

Ebola outbreaks happen every couple years, with a previous outbreak from 2021 raising the alarm of a lab leak, due to suspicious genomic similarity with a previous strain from several years prior.

Ultimately, it seems far more likely that the explanation is delayed spread from a survivor of the previous outbreak as an STD, which is known to occur, but it seems remotely possible that discarded old viral samples could have led to a reinfection.

This ebola outbreak has the potential to lead to high loss of life, which makes it quite surprising that it hasn’t captured the public’s imagination in the same way the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship has. It has similarly failed to capture Manifold market creators’ imaginations, thus far, and we invite users to create more markets to help the public track and understand this crisis.

Roundup

Manifold user Bandors (of FOLDED fame) has created a hantavirus tracking website which he is hoping will go viral. This market resolves YES if he gets 10k unique visitors within a month of creation. Traders think this may or may not happen. With the outbreak winding down, traders are skeptical:

And if you like longer term markets, you could trade on the possibility of a pandemic before 2030:

Happy Forecasting!

-Above the Fold

The basics: You get entries with mana. The more mana you put in, the more entries you get, with no purchase necessary. There’s also a free entry just for showing up.

• One free entry per drawing. No mana required, though you do need to have at least M1,000 invested in active predictions on the site.

• Get entries with mana. More mana = more entries! The exact rate follows a bonding curve, so early entrants get a bit of an edge to disincentivise last-minute sniping.

• Verifiable randomness. When a drawing closes, winners are picked using a Bitcoin block hash as the random seed. The outcome is publicly verifiable, and nobody (including us!) can rig it.

• Paid in USDC on the Ethereum network, sent directly to a wallet of your choice. More on payouts and eligibility below.

Prize Drawing #2 was our biggest yet: a $10,000 prize pool split across seven ranked winners.

Bayesian took the $9,000 top prize out of 510 unique entrants and 1.74M mana spent on entries. It was great to see a highly active user get rewarded, and we continue to bring prizes to many more members of the Manifold community. It really is anyone’s game.

$100 a day, every day

We’re currently running a $100 prize drawing every single day, so everyone gets more chances to win. We have already seen two repeat winners, including DottedCalculator’s $100 USDC win in drawing #8 with only 821 entries for M200 total (a 0.52% chance to win).

Before that, we also saw phenomist win the 7th place prize ($50) in the first-ever prize drawing, holding only 0.09% of total entries (1,664).

Anything can happen, so check in every day to claim your free entry.

Eligibility, Payouts, and Charity

The (small) catch: To participate and claim your prize, we all need to play by the rules. That means you need to be at least 18 years old and not based in an ineligible jurisdiction (which includes some US states and a few countries around the world). Check out the Prize Drawing FAQ for specifics on how to qualify (and how to avoid some things that may disqualify you).

Prizes are paid in USDC on Ethereum. After winning a prize, you’ll need to connect a wallet on the respective prize page where you won.

A couple of winners from Drawing #2 still haven’t submitted a wallet. We’ve held their prizes - no one’s been forfeited for being slow… yet.

If a winner is ineligible or declines their prize, it rolls into the Charity Giveaway, which has now grown to $1,550 with these additions. Traders can convert mana into entries to boost their favorite charity’s odds. When the giveaway ends, we’ll draw one lucky entry (using the same mechanism as the prize drawings) to determine the winning charity.

The Charity Giveaway also comes with extras: the Champion Trophy and the Champion’s Legacy profile background.

With giveaways, physical merch, Manifest tickets, Manifold subscriptions, digital goods, there’s never been a better time to have mana - or buy it!

For a Limited Time: Double Trader Bonuses

As we keep experimenting, one of our primary goals is to improve market visibility and delivery on the site. Content on Manifold has always been primarily community-created and driven, which is what makes the site so great.

We’d like to see a lot more markets for both popular and niche topics, and we know that means ensuring traders will see and predict on the questions that are important to you. We’ll be rolling out some updates to content delivery, so keep an eye out for more details.

While we work on those, we’re also doubling all trader bonuses for the next 10 days.

This means, for each liquidity tier:

• M100 = M6 per trader, 17 traders to break even

• M1,000 = M20 per trader, 50 traders to break even

• M10,000 = M30 per trader, 333 traders to break even

• M100,000 = M40, 2,500 traders to break even

This will be immediate and universal, so existing market creators should already see the mana flowing!

We’re also keeping an eye out for well-defined markets asking timely or important questions, and Manifold will add to the liquidity pool to incentivise traders.

→ Create a Market

The Golden Age of Mana

Still have mana burning a hole in your pocket and want something in hand to show for it? Alongside the digital benefits, we’ve launched a series of real-world benefits to reward the best creators and predictors:

• Manifest 2026 tickets — at the time of writing, there are 12 tickets left in the mana shop. Manifold subscribers get their usual shop discount, and mana can be purchased with crypto for a discount. Either option makes this the cheapest way to buy a standard Manifest ticket.

  Yes, that means you can buy the Manifold Pro subscription for M2,500 and save M3,375 on a Manifest ticket immediately.

  Already going to Manifest? Place your bets on the Manifest 2026 Prop Bets market. There’s a 78% chance of 10+ attendees with a Wikipedia page, 46% chance for Karaoke, and a 33% chance of someone in a full fursuit. (Have an idea for something not on this market? Add your own answers!)

• Manifold merch — grab some ahead of Manifest! Physical merch, delivered to your door. The merch shop launched very recently, and we’ve already had nearly 100 successful merch orders, with an average time-to-ship of under 2 days. Merch is also discounted by site subscription.

  

• Prize Drawing or Charity giveaways — as explained, win cash for yourself, or for the charity of your choice.

If there’s any other way you’d like to use your mana or you have ideas for fun contests, let us know! We want everyone to feel like Manifold is a good use of their time, so we can continue to be there when you want to see the future or bet on anything.

If you still haven’t made a mana purchase with crypto, you will receive +10% bonus mana on your first crypto purchase, and an additional +10% if you buy >$1,000.

*Don’t like crypto? No worries, we heard you: card payments are back!

Now, go take advantage of limited-time 2x trader bonuses, grab an entry (or a few!) to the daily prize drawing, support your favorite charity, browse the mana shop, and feel free to give us some suggestions and feedback along the way!

-Stef, Tod, and the Manifold Team

As closing arguments begin in Musk v. Altman, you might notice that the contours of the AI race have changed a lot in the last few years. About a decade ago, Elon Musk was the face of OpenAI and their biggest funder. Musk and Altman had organized OpenAI as a counterweight to Deepmind, after its acquisition by Google in 2015. By 2018, Musk had mostly disengaged from his involvement in the company, after a complicated internal struggle for leadership. It took another few years, though, for the animosity to reach a breaking point. After the launch of ChatGPT, and Microsoft’s subsequent investment in the company, Musk argues that he became convinced that the OpenAI leadership was out of alignment with its original goals as a non-profit. A more cynical interpretation is that Musk had already begun to launch his own private company, xAI, and was setting the groundwork for an attempt at competition.

Regardless of his motives, by early 2024, Musk had filed suit. This was re-filed, later in the year, with Microsoft added as a defendant. In November, he filed for an injunction to block OpenAI’s conversion to a public benefit corporation, but Judge Yvonne Rogers, who is currently presiding over Musk v. Altman, denied this injunction.

By late last year, the case had narrowed to two of its 26 original claims.

• Breach of charitable trust: the for-profit restructuring of OpenAI violated the trust of Musk’s original $38 million in donations.

• Unjust enrichment: OpenAI, Altman, and Brockman used Musk’s contributions for unauthorized commercial purposes which enriched them and their partners.

Last month, the trial began, with Musk seeking up to $150 billion in damages, which would go to OpenAI’s charitable arm, as well as the reversal of the conversion to a public benefit corporation and the removal of Altman and Brockman from leadership at OpenAI.

All these outcomes are still on the table.

Traders currently think there’s about a 1 in 3 chance of a full win by the defense, a 1 in 3 chance of Musk winning, within which a majority of scenarios would involve purely monetary relief of some kind, and a 1 in 3 chance of a settlement or some sort of procedural resolution.

The 12% chance of structural relief should give concern to OpenAI investors. Clawing back the conversion to a public benefit corporation would be unprecedented but would likely be quite painful for the company.

A lot of online commentary has treated a Musk win as kind of inevitable, and indeed, in 61% of scenarios, according to this market, there’s at least a settlement of some kind. But that settled amount could be quite low. Traders on a market with prop bets on the trial think that there’s only a 29% chance that the total damages awarded could exceed $10 billion, which at least to me weakly implies that were a settlement to be reached, it would likely be lower than this total.

Forecasters were caught off guard by Ilya testifying in the trial, that prop traded at around 30% until the announcement was made that he would in fact be testifying. Traders here also think that a licensing restriction, nullifying OpenAI’s exclusive licensing agreement with Microsoft, is a more likely structural remedy than undoing the for-profit conversion or ousting Altman or Brockman. So far, Musk has been remarkably restrained on X, and hasn’t been held in contempt of court for posting, but there’s always a chance, with traders still giving 12% odds to such an occurrence before the trial is complete.

OpenAI v. Everyone

OpenAI’s legal troubles, across the board, are a millstone around their neck for the foreseeable future. Anthropic’s battles with the Trump administration have sort of fallen by the wayside, with the DoD now back in engagement with the company despite their “supply chain risk” dispute.

It’s easy to forget, but the trial between the New York Times and OpenAI/Microsoft still promises fireworks. Markets have them as favorites to win (or at least settle in their favor):

The case has dragged on in pre-trial due to a number of consolidations, but traders think it’ll be a blockbuster, with more than a 1 in 4 chance of getting up to the supreme court!

Reading through the prop bet market’s strikes provides a little window into the Overton window of 2024. It’s almost inconceivable to imagine the court “ordering GPT-4 to be deleted” whatever that would mean at this point. Also, the idea of $10 or $100 million being reasonable bars to set for “large amount of money to OpenAI” may have made sense in early 2024 but now seem laughably small.

Another trial, which briefly made the headlines, is the most prominent of several wrongful-death lawsuits filed in California against OpenAI by the Social Media Victims Law Center. The parents of 23-year old Zane Shamblin have brought multiple claims against OpenAI for the wrongful death of their son.

It would be great to have more forecasters take a look at this new market, as wrongful death suits have the potential to dramatically shift the way AI is deployed among laypeople, especially with certain AI companies positioning themselves as deploying primarily enterprise models and others developing apps for the median global citizen.

Renting Compute

This trial has also made some unusual bedfellows. As Intelligencer and others have reported, xAI (which has plenty of compute but not enough users) has loaned its Colossus 1 data center to Anthropic (which has plenty of users but never enough compute). Pertinently, Colossus 1, which has a hodgepodge of different GPU clusters within it rather than a single, unified architecture , is better for inference than training workloads (serving AI models rather than shaping them), which is precisely where Anthropic is currently straining at its buttons. But it’s hard not to see this move as a middle finger to their mutual rival despite it also making business sense on a couple levels.

Forecasters had been mixed on the odds of this happening, and in fact, earlier in the year, it looked quite unlikely, with xAI posturing as though they were going to go all-in on competing as a frontier AI lab. After their merger with SpaceX was announced in February, however, the market shifted dramatically north.

With certain markets, I actually think the creator deserves a lot of credit for writing a question well in advance of that question becoming highly relevant. Manifold user RS also has markets on whether OpenAI or Meta will rent compute to external customers by the end of the year. OpenAI is trading at 11% (I guess there’s always a chance of some sort of compute arbitrage even among the leaders) but the market on Meta, which is trading at 38%, has woefully few traders and is probably your best bet at fading Meta’s near-term chances.

If Meta starts renting out their compute before the end of year, I think it’s safe to say that that would be a negative signal towards their success at staying afloat in the race.

Roundup

Pope Leo’s first encyclical, now all-but-confirmed to be about AI, will come out on Friday. I’m excited to read the document, Pope Francis’s encyclicals were famously bangers, from Laudato si’ on consumerism and climate change to Fratelli tutti on global consensus and camaraderie.

You can trade on whether it’ll release on time, mention human extinction or deepfakes, discuss if an AI can possess a soul, and name an AI exec (I think this option is slightly underpriced at 3% but I can’t trade on my own market: free alpha here).

You can also trade on whether Pope Leo will mention prediction markets this year:

Also, Trump and Xi appeared to have shaken hands in their recent face-to-face meeting for 14.5 seconds, just under the highest bucket. Too short!

Happy Forecasting!

-Above the Fold

Market Boosts

You can now boost a market directly from the creation page! If you know that everyone on the site is going to want to see your genius market, you can go ahead and grab a boost as an add-on instantly.

Boosts are awesome because they put your market in front of everybody for a day, and since March, they now come with a cool bonus of M$5000 in liquidity! You can bet on boost sales here:

Prizes & Charity

The Charity Champion Trophy is now showcased on the Charity page - be the #1 entry holder in the charity giveaway to claim this super-cool trophy from @Eliza. Holding the trophy at any point grants permanent ownership of “Champion’s Legacy” hovercard background.

Don’t care about prize drawings or charity giveaways? Don’t sweat it, turn off the notifications here in the notification settings tab. There was definitely a bug here before, but now we’re 100% sure it works.

If you were one of the first people to buy Prize Drawing entries, you may have noticed that you paid a bit more than you expected. This was due to the way the rates were calculated on the bonding curve: the mana price of each entry increased with each additional one you purchased. This was most noticeable for the first few users in each drawing when the curve was the steepest, but as of yesterday, you will no longer be charged any more than the amount you put in the field! Your total spend will be capped at that amount, even if the bounding rate is steep or another user swipes those cheaper entries out from under you.

Thanks to @MarySmith for adding the Free State Project to the list of available charities! At the moment, the FSP has a 15% chance of winning the $1500 payout, contribute towards (or against) them on the Charity page.

Merch & Shop

In case you missed it: Card purchases with Stripe are back! We still prefer buyers to use crypto to avoid fees, but all verified or grandfathered accounts are now able to use their credit card to buy mana again.

When ordering merch, there’s a new optional email field - if there are any delivery issues, this allows the customs office or carrier to contact you to get it resolved. For Brazil and some regions of Spain, the field is mandatory for duty resolution.

Also, for users shipping merch to Brazil or South Korea, we now collect a personal tax ID, which is required to pass through customs. If you live in one of those countries and had issues with your order, try again now with the updated form! As always, DM @Gen if you have any issues with an order.

In the shop, there’s a new “Owned” tab where you can find every profile and avatar cosmetic that you’ve purchased. Build the right fashion loadout for today’s trading, all in one spot.

If there are no seasonal items available at the time, the Seasonal tab will be hidden. But don’t fear, your previously purchased seasonal items are still visible in the “owned” tab. There’s also a handy tooltip on those items to tell you why they’re hidden in the regular shop.

There’s now a link to the Manifest website on the Manifest ticket in the shop, in case you were wondering what exactly you were buying a ticket for.

There was a secret feature in the shop where you could make the item cards dance by hovering your cursor at just the right spot - the card would raise just above the cursor and then lower back down, jittering over and over again. This has been removed because dancing is illegal on Manifold.

API & Bots

Do you have a bot on Manifold? If you do, and they make over M$100 in profit in a month, they’re now eligible to receive league rewards! The top 6 bots each month will receive rewards similar to other leagues, with the top bot earning M$800.

If you don’t run a bot already, this is a great time to start. You can now mark your account as a bot easily from your Account Settings to automatically enroll in the Silicon League. Ask in the #api-and-bots channel of Discord if you need help or advice from other bot-makers!

For you API power users: All timestamps are now precise! There was an issue with how timestamps (such as a bet’s createdTime) were handled as they made their way from the database through the API server, which led to them being truncated to the second. Now, all timestamps should have proper resolution all the way down to the millisecond.

If you’re placing comments from the API, you should also be aware that we’ll now reject any comment with a replyToCommentId that doesn’t exist. Instead of that comment being lost in the void forever, we now let you know so you can reply to a comment that does exist.

Also, when you go to cycle your API key, the site makes it clear that this will break all integrations using the key instead of referring to the old Twitch integration that no one has used in years.

Miscellaneous

• The daily $100 prize drawing is now automatic! No more waiting until an admin clicks the button. Long-time league members will remember a similar situation way back when.

• Did you know that when you zoom in on a market’s price history, the y-axis shrinks to show you the relevant area? Now that also applies to numeric and date charts! A good example:

• You can now filter the browse page by date markets, helping you find all those “when will X happen” markets to bet down since nothing ever happens.

• When we introduced cosmetics in the shop, we had hardcoded in the names of each item on the stats page, which led to some items in the table being referred to by their internal key. Now everything is nice and consistent, and will update auto-magically.

• Enlarging an image posted in a market description or comment section used to have a bug where a couple of special UI elements would continue to be drawn on top, especially user avatars from the right-hand sidebar on desktop. This is fixed, so now you can watch Supernatural gifs in full screen without any distractions.

• Pro tip: when you hover over a bet in the feed, you can see a lot of detailed information, such as the timestamps, share price, and limit order details. Now we also show a couple more decimals on the mana fields to help you understand exactly how much was spent on each trade.

• On mobile, the leagues horizontal scrollbar now shows arrows indicating that you can scroll, or just press the arrows to move. On desktop, these only show when you hover over the ribbon.

• Some buttons on the sidebar used to be comically narrow, especially the App button. This bothered me way more than it should have, and now all sidebar items are the same width.

Feedback

Any comments or questions about the changes above, feel free to post them below! I’ll do my best to answer anything, and I hope to do these changelog roundups in the future at least once a month. If you see any bugs similar to the ones above, feel free to post in the #bugs channel on Discord, or DM me on Manifold.

- wasabipesto

But while spot-scoring is fun, and lets you reward accurate forecasts rather than constant updating, some people (like you, the reader) like to forecast and trade on markets all year long. And there’s even an internal Manifold leaderboard for the traders that earn the most on this question set.

All these questions resolve at the end of the year, and Scott Alexander with Metaculus has done a great job of creating a diverse question set of fairly significant questions.

Currently, the market drawing the most attention and traders is on whether an AI-created song will chart in the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 this year.

Traders are heavily divergent on this, with #1 on the all-time leaderboard, SemioticRivalry and one of the Manifold founders, Ian, staking out massive YES positions against the #24 all-time trader, Panfilo.

While AI-generated songs have reached as high as #1, on other charts, there is discussion as to whether Billboard would allow an AI song to chart, or selectively exclude it from the rankings. AI-generated music hasn’t yet had the kind of viral moments as text, image, or video-generation, but this is probably due to the nature of how users share this content. While images and videos can go viral from anyone, songs often require a bit of lift-off. This can happen organically through things like TikTok audio clips, but generally a platform is required, and artists are hesitant to turn over creative control to the AI to the extent that a song could meaningfully be described as “AI-created,” rather than, perhaps, utilizing AI to create a single track that might be imperceptible to the listener.

The market remains at 31%, well below the aggregated forecast on Metaculus. The divergence between the markets and the aggregated forecast is interesting here, as typically Metaculus tends to be more conservative in the direction of things-not-happening.

Another AI capabilities market, on whether an AI model will reach a 3-hour time horizon at 80% reliability this year on METR’s benchmark, seems all but certain at this point.

The remaining uncertainty centers around whether METR will change their methodology or stop adjudicating models by this benchmark due to saturation or other priorities.

There have also been some large swings this year on the market on whether OpenAI will manage to file for (not complete!) an IPO this year.

This market trades a few percentage points above similar real-money markets on whether OpenAI will complete their IPO by the end of December, as filings typically happen anywhere from 15 days to six months in advance of the actual offering.

A couple of questions recently resolved, such as NASA’s Artemis II completing its mission successfully, and SCOTUS somewhat surprisingly issuing a firm ruling that Trump’s emergency tariffs were unlawful.

There are plenty of remaining questions that have split the Manifold community. For example, Keir Starmer’s fate has traded between 40% and 60% for most of this year:

And in lieu of any public statements by Supreme Court justices Alito or Thomas, the best we can do is this prediction market on whether SCOTUS will have a retirement this year before the midterms, which Metaculus prices decently lower at 24% and real-money markets place higher, above 40%!

On some of these questions, with just a couple dozen traders, there’s room for newbies to stake out a claim for themselves. For example, my favorite question in the tournament, on Montenegro’s accession to the EU, is one of the least-traded markets in the set!

Do none of you care about EU expansion? Croatia was the last country to join back in 2013; a lot has happened in the world since then. Montenegro, which began the year with just 12 negotiating chapters closed, has set the ambitious goal to close the remainder of these chapters this year, and hopefully join the EU by 2028. This is the EU equivalent of trying to walk 100,000 steps in one day.

The world’s second-most deadly ongoing conflict, in Sudan, might finally reach a ceasefire this year, as well, with a 25% chance of at least a temporary end to the civil war. Perhaps more forecasters should devote their analytical attention to this:

There’s also a meta-question in the ACX tournament, on how well the top bot will place, relative to the top 5 humans.

Forecasters expect that the top bot will be about as good as last year’s 92% score, which some forecasters viewed as anomalously high. They give a 24% chance that the best bot does as well or better than the average of the top 5, though. Someone should have made a bot to trade on the ACX question set, so we could see how it matched up on the same question set in a different modality. Currently no bot ranks on the leaderboard:

These markets have large liquidity subsidies and many will come down to the wire, so there’s still time to win the Unofficial Manifold x ACX 2026 contest. Special thank you to Manifold user “walmart” for creating all the markets.

Get those limit orders up and happy forecasting!

-Above the Fold

And markets can provide clarity. Here’s the polling on the race:

Not super informative. With the top-two primary in six weeks, no candidate currently is polling above 18%. Two of the four candidates polling the highest are Republicans, who haven’t won statewide office in twenty years. And another is, ummm, Eric Swalwell. Until a couple weeks ago, U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell was the frontrunner in the race. He has since suspended his campaign after serious and credible allegations against him came to light.

The second-place Democrat in the polls, Tom Steyer, has now swapped places with Swalwell in betting odds (see Swalwell in purple drop to zero as Steyer’s in yellow soars up to ~60% above). Steyer is a slightly awkward candidate, as an aging billionaire turned climate activist who has managed to ingratiate himself into three of the resurgent wings of the Democratic primary base: progressives, YIMBYs, and resistance libs. And yet, he’s still only polling around 15%. But with just a few weeks to go, it’s unclear that any other Democrat stands a good chance of making the top two.

Matt Mahan, the tech industry-backed San Jose mayor, was a prediction market darling for a month or two, but has failed to gain momentum in the polls. Katie Porter, like Swalwell a U.S. rep with a nationwide profile, thanks to her schtick of holding up whiteboards in congressional hearings, has also failed to convert that profile into enthusiastic support.

Xavier Becerra has been within striking distance of Steyer in a couple recent polls, and was HHS secretary under Biden for four years, a position now occupied by RFK Jr. Unlike RFK Jr., Becerra isn’t exactly a household name; nevertheless, he finds himself cutting into Steyer’s lead in the markets.

While polls testing the waters for a very late write-in entry, Kamala Harris, have teased her interest, the markets think that it’s unlikely that she’d enter at this stage. Instead, traders continue to think her eyes might lie on the 2028 election:

The nightmare scenario for Democrats, being locked out of the general election in the top-two primary, appears unlikely at this point. But a few % is not nothing. Conservative TV show host Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco are both polling above 10%, and if the Democratic primary becomes even more splintered, or an independent candidate like Elaine Culotti takes off, this is a remote possibility. For example, imagine Steyer falls in the polls due to a scandal too minor to force him to drop out, or if Mahan starts rising, eating share from Steyer and Becerra. If Bianco gains on Hilton, they could realistically each get ~16% of the vote.

If we wake up on June 3rd and the vote tallies read…

Hilton: 17%
Bianco: 16%
Steyer: 14%
Becerra: 14%
Mahan: 13%
Porter: 12%
Culotti: 9%
Other: 5%

…would anyone be truly shocked? Why would any of these candidates drop out if they’re all polling within a couple percent of each other, with decent odds of making the general election? Betty Yee dropped out this morning, and candidates like Tony Thurmond and Antonio Villaraigosa are potentially poised to do so as well, with their poor polling numbers. But just 4 Dems and one indie candidate remaining alive could allow a comfortable shutout. A ton of people will be on the ballot and a Californian primary election isn’t exactly the place you’d expect the extreme salience of tactical voting required to drive down the “Other” box.

That being said, it’s likely that news coverage around the race, along with top-down action from the Democratic party, will push forward a favorite or two to ensure this doesn’t happen, especially because this election is far less ideologically contentious than you might expect. There’s no clear “progressive” candidate running, with Porter, Steyer, and Becerra all having claims to that mantle. Most of the candidates are more or less amenable to a broad swathe of the Democratic electorate.

This is quite different from the election we’re seeing in Los Angeles, where incumbent mayor Karen Bass is now trailing rising progressive star Nithya Raman.

This wasn’t always the case. Raman has enjoyed a steady rise in prediction market odds since entering the race on the last possible day after observing that there was no strong challenger from the progressive wing.

Karen Bass, who if readers will recall, was close to being selected as VP by Biden in the 2020 election, has not a great run of things as mayor. She has received strong criticism for her handling of the L.A. fires and their aftermath, as well as the inability to address L.A.’s housing crisis. As a result, traders give her less than a 1 in 3 chance at retaining her mayoralty.

Raman’s campaign has drawn comparisons to Mamdani’s, but she’s actually being battled on her left by community organizer Rae Huang. DSA hasn’t endorsed either yet, likely expecting that Raman has better odds of winning but slightly poorer ideological alignment with DSA.

Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star and critic of Bass’s handling of the fire, also stands an outside chance, if he can consolidate the more centrist and populist voters in the primary.

Despite what seem to me to be two of the most interesting and significant elections we’ve seen for a long time in California, Manifold traders seem way more interested in something happening farther down the ballot.

A proposal for a wealth tax on billionaires is trying to make its way onto the ballot this November. Traders think it has a ~73% chance of qualifying, and give it ~58% odds of passing, conditional on appearing on the ballot.

All told, that gives the proposal better than 1 in 3 odds of passing this year.

Billionaires have preemptively begun to flee the state and establish residency elsewhere, as the law retroactively applies to anyone in residence at the start of 2026! Traders think that even if the law passes, there’s a considerable chance that it’s overturned by the courts or fails to practically collect revenue (at least $1 billion):

If you are completely uninterested in the California elections except for as it pertains to AI, perhaps you’ll be pleased to know that traders remain unconvinced by Altman’s threat from a few months ago to move OpenAI out of California…

…despite decent odds of another AI ballot measure this fall:

And if you like mayor elections but only those that have no governor above them, well, that leaves you with just the fascinating and increasingly contentious DC mayor election, where the DSA-aligned Janeese Lewis George is leading against the center-left Kenyan McDuffie.

And finally, if you don’t care about elections at all, and you also hate California, well… perhaps you’ll be interested in this long time-horizon market.

Happy forecasting!

-Above the Fold

We’re returning to Lighthaven on June 12-14. You can buy your tickets now on the Manifest website, with Early Bird pricing through this Saturday, April 18:

Get Tickets

What: Manifest is a festival ostensibly about prediction markets, but secretly about connecting with old friends and people you admire from your favorite niche corners of the internet. It’s a gathering of nerds who want to find the thinkers and practitioners they vehemently agree/disagree with, share a meal around a cozy campfire, and come away with radically new ways of thinking. If you attend, don’t be surprised to find yourself engrossed in a late-night rabbit hole with your future cofounder, a serendipitous nerd snipe from an internet celebrity, and the joy of a crowd cheering (and betting with mana) on a wrestling match between strangers.

Who: 500-650 exceptional people, from many fields, including but not limited to: forecasting, rationality, effective altruism, AI & AI safety, economics, finance, tech, policy, writing, and novel ideas.

When: June 12-14 (Fri-Sun)

Where: Lighthaven, Berkeley, CA (map)

How:

• 🎟️ Tickets (Early Bird until Sat 4/18!)

• 🏡 Room bookings

To get updates: Join the Manifest Discord

This year, we want to make it even better, focusing on the things attendees have told us they value most: high session quality and variety, well-curated attendees, thoughtful sponsor presence, delightfully engaging activities, easy-to-use scheduling, clear community guidelines, and structured ways to meet and stay in touch with the people you’re supposed to meet.

Email team@manifest.is if you have questions, ideas, or feedback. We’d love to hear suggestions for more excellent speakers or organizations to collaborate with. Help us fill Manifest with the most stellar, thoughtful, kind humans you know!

You’ll hear updates from us as we confirm more of the speakers, sponsors, and plans we’re cooking up. We look forward to seeing you in June!

Highlights from 2025

2025 Talks included:

• A Story Telling of Kalshi’s Internal Drama & Decision Making (Noah Sternig)

• Reversible Cryopreservation (Laura Deming)

• Writing and Slop (Roon, Scott Alexander, Gwern, Alexander Wales)

• Life as a Professional Gambler (Anonymous)

• Has Trading and Gambling Gone Too Far in the US (Jeremiah Johnson, Isaac Rose-Berman, Christopher Gerlacher)

• How Tech Hiring is Changing with AI (Sholto Douglas [Anthropic], Ben Cohen [Substack])

• Schools Should Pursue Excellence (Tracing Woodgrains)

• How to be Hot (Aella, Chesed)

Check out our YouTube channel for more examples from past years!

Some of our 2025 Events:

• Nash Pit: A Prediction Market Game Show

• Night Market + Career Fair

• Live Polling on Spicy Questions

• Speed Friending

• Rare & Exotic Drama Games from Australia

• Hot Seat w/ Niacin (vitamin B3, which causes a rapid flushing response)

• Startup Pitch Competition

• Poker tournament with former pros

Get Tickets

Speakers & Events

Every year, we’re grateful for the amazing speakers and guests who come out to Manifest!

Stay tuned as we announce the speaker lineup for this year. And if you want to give a talk, or have an idea for an event that needs our input/support, email winter@manifest.is.

Also, anyone is welcome to host a community talk or event! In “un-conference” style, Manifest will release a schedule with rooms and time slots you can add your session to.

Keep an eye out if you have something you’d like to share, we’ll send this calendar to attendees closer to the event (and it can be updated on the fly throughout Manifest, so you can add your talk if the inspiration strikes!)

Sponsors

Interested in recruiting the kinds of folks who find these kinds of intellectual discussions energizing? Or showcasing your company’s work in front of the influential speakers and leaders in attendance? Manifest has you covered. Each year, attendees report having impactful interactions with sponsors and appreciate their presence at the event. They find jobs, form new collaborations, and even switch industries! Email team@manifest.is to learn more and schedule a call.

Career Fair

On Friday, June 12 (the first night of Manifest), Lighthaven will be open and free to the public for our Career Fair + Night Market! This will be an excellent opportunity for even more people to mingle, talk to hiring sponsors, and join the fun for a few hours.

We ask that everyone interested (whether or not you’re attending the rest of Manifest) please register your interest in the Career Fair here.

Get Tickets

Festimonials

Don’t just take our word for it; here’s what our past attendees have to say (emphasis ours):

Jake Seliger:

Bess and I went to Manifest, which bills itself as “A festival for forecasting and prediction markets,” a description that may technically be true but fails to capture the spirit; to my eye and experience, it’s maybe more accurately stated as “Substack and Twitter live” or “a mixture of festival-conference-party-Burning-Man for nerds with many interests to show up and enjoy each other’s company.” Bess excitedly exclaimed it to be “Nerd Camp!” with a sort of takes-one-to-know-one gleam in her eye.

Tomie:

I love Manifest. I paid the full price for the full ticket, sucker I am, and my subsidy provided for these swaying bauble lights, these warm soporific nooks, these flames and corridors, these souls brought to Earth together, eyes lighting up at their electric worlds made real.

TracingWoodgrains:

For much of my life, I have poured my attention into tough-to-explain solitary pursuits, finding myself often sitting in quiet corners on the fringes of gatherings wondering if they’re worth the effort. Not so last weekend.

“I really like that Manifest is inspiring in me the ‘Oh, I should make and bring random goofy stickers and swag’ impulse that I’ve had inculcated in me by Defcon” - Dave Kasten

“Maybe the best conference I ever went to, beating all programming conferences, EAG, singularity summit” - MQP

Venue

Just like last year, Manifest will be held at Lighthaven. We credit much of the great Manifest vibes to this beautiful and cozy space. It has fires for literal fireside chats, intimate nooks for one-on-one conversations, spaces for small workshops & big talks, and gorgeous overnight accommodations.

Festival Season! LessOnline —> Summer Camp —> Manifest

Manifest is actually the capstone to a 10-day season at Lighthaven! The weekend before will be LessOnline (June 5 - June 7): “A festival of writers who are wrong on the internet”. It is an unconference with a collaborative schedule, bringing together a “mostly-online subculture of people trying to work together to figure out how to distinguish truth from falsehood using insights from probability theory, cognitive science, and AI.”

In the days between the two conferences, there will be Summer Camp (June 8 - June 11), a peaceful yet vibrant week of coworking, collaborating, and late-night campfire chats. You might see: Hackathons (or “Forecastathons”), organized discussions, jam sessions, dance parties, tournaments, games of all kinds, camp activities (sardines, s’mores), or multi-day intensive workshops (e.g., CFAR-style).

You can come to any combination of these, but we’re offering a $350 discount off standard pricing if you buy All-Access tickets to all three events, available here.

See you at Manifest!

Amidst the recent turmoil between the federal government, Anthropic, and its rivals, I’ve seen a number of commentators point out something interesting. The private ownership of Anthropic and OpenAI means that far fewer Americans have a direct stake in their success than in other firms of their size and centrality to the economy.

If the Pentagon had attempted to label, say, Walmart or Exxon Mobil a supply chain risk, then the tens or hundreds of millions of Americans with direct stakes in the stocks of those companies would feel the effects, regardless of their personal affinities towards them.

This might change soon. Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies are rushing to IPO as soon as this year. They will skyrocket into the top echelon of publicly traded companies if and when this happens. It wasn’t always obvious that they’d choose to press for a fast timeline. With their ability to attract the largest private investment rounds in history, it wasn’t clear that going public was as necessary as for other capital-intensive private companies.

But, with secondary markets clamoring for access to shares, and capital expenditures for hyperscalers rising just as precipitously as revenue, IPOs in the next 12 months are likely. Internal pressure from employees with equity and early VCs won’t hurt. Manifold traders are quite interested in the topic as well…

For a while, the race to IPO for American private AI firms looked like more of a three-horse race, but the merger of xAI and SpaceX put that to rest, with SpaceX/xAI now very likely to go public within the next few months.

While many observers might fairly think that xAI isn’t really in the same league as the other two companies, they did in fact raise money earlier this year at about half the valuation of Anthropic (about $250 billion). And now, packaged with SpaceX, they might be more valuable than both.

But, ummmm, it’s not clear how long this will hold.

Valuations

Just like the intelligence of their models, their number of employees, their revenue, and the number of protestors outside their offices, the valuations of these companies (check out MNX) seem to be doubling every few months.

Epoch has had great success drawing straight lines on log-plots, and they called Anthropic surpassing OpenAI’s revenue in early 2026.

With their latest run-rate revenue forecast of $30 billion a few days ago, this market resolved YES, sending markets on whether Anthropic would flip OpenAI skyrocketing.

The market on combined EOY revenue for America’s three private AI companies had to create some new buckets in the last week, as the top bound was around $150 billion, which now looks to be below the median trader’s expectations. Two Twitter users (at least one of whom is a top Manifold trader, I believe) made an over/under bet at $90 billion on just Anthropic’s run-rate revenue, and we now have a market on it:

Much of the recent bullishness around Anthropic has been the disclosure of their Mythos model. Enough ink has been spilled about Project Glasswing and Mythos’s emergent ability to spot zero-day vulnerabilities, but nevertheless…

It’s a story that at the same time is extremely urgent for the public and policymakers while being slightly overhyped in breathless reporting. As keen observers have by now pointed out, previous models like Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 likely have abilities nearing this as well, with Mythos representing a continued climb up that particular capability curve, rather than a discontinuous jump. Skeptics have noticed that the amount of cost and compute thrown at discovering individual vulnerabilities during testing ranged up into the ballpark of tens of thousands of dollars, and mused that Opus 4.6, given that amount of time and energy, could probably find a similar vulnerability.

Obviously, without public access to the models, it’s hard to say. No one seriously doubts that Mythos is a highly capable model, and traders in fact think that sooner or later, Anthropic will release it to the public in some form:

And when it does, it will likely come in at about 10x the cost of other frontier models on a per-token basis.

And even if we don’t get Mythos, we’ll likely have access to something with similar capabilities within the next few months:

Bubble

Alternatively, many online and even some on Manifold hold a very different set of beliefs about how AI will play out over this year. While it’s hard to operationalize a market on what an AI bubble “popping” would look like, one creator has given it a good try:

The criteria for this market read:

This could manifest in many different ways:
- Sudden drop of the NQINTEL or S&P500 indexes
- Halt of capital expenditure and/or VC investment in AI
- Private AI companies (such as OAI, xAI, Anthropic, etc.) raising at substantially lower valuations than previous rounds, defaulting or shutting down.
- Governments / big enterprises moving down AI in their priority lists.
These events need to be widely reported and referred to as an AI crash or similar by trusted news sources such as Bloomberg, NY Times, FT, Reuters, AP, etc.
Other reasons for a stock market crash or economic slowdown (tariffs, wars, etc.) will not count.

Alternatively, another creator has simply made a market on which AI companies will drop dramatically from their peak this year. Apart from Oracle, traders think this is unlikely for most firms that are heavily leveraged in the AI boom.

Notably, the odds for a general recession—potentially caused by, umm, overseas conflict—are much higher than a crash localized to the AI sector:

Roundup

Not just the AI companies might go public this year. You can bet on Discord, Anduril, Skims, and Jersey Mikes too!

Is Mythos really AGI if it can’t speedrun Minecraft?

And we probably won’t know what Ilya has been up to by July:

Happy Forecasting!

-Above the Fold

Trump accused him of leaking classified information. He then directed Pete Hegseth (my bad - Secretary of War) to begin identifying and releasing government files related to “alien and extraterrestrial life, UAP, and UFOs,” citing “tremendous interest shown.”

Hegseth reposted the announcement with an alien emoji and a saluting emoji. Three days later, asked whether he personally believed in extraterrestrials, he said the task was not on his “bingo card” but he was “digging in” and would find out “along with all of you.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence posted on social media that the files would “soon” be declassified.

Last week, the White House registered aliens.gov and alien.gov through CISA’s federal domain registry. Currently, neither connects to anything. The deputy press secretary responded to press inquiries with “Stay tuned!” and an alien emoji. Both domains were registered while CISA is not currently accepting new .gov requests, due to a lapse in federal funding.

The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, AARO, was created in 2022 to investigate unidentified anomalous phenomena. It has reviewed over 2,000 cases. Every one traced back to drones, balloons, atmospheric effects, or sensor artifacts. Sean Kirkpatrick, its first director, said of the incoming file release: “Nothing would have made me happier in that job but to have discovered alien technology and rolled it out. I don’t expect to see anything new.” He described Trump’s announcement as “a distraction for the administration.”

The reason the interesting UAP evidence can’t be released is structural. The most compelling cases are compelling because classified sensors detected them: military radar, satellite tasking, signals intelligence. Releasing the footage means revealing what those systems can see, at what resolution, from what angle. Past disclosures have leaned on pilot reports and low-resolution cockpit video while withholding the metadata. The result is always redacted PDFs.

The disclosure community has been predicting imminent official confirmation since the Clinton administration. Obama, Hillary Clinton, Biden, Trump’s first term, Trump’s second term, and Pope Leo XIV have all been identified at various points as the figure about to initiate disclosure. In 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that hundreds of Air Force personnel had been told, falsely, that a secret program to harvest alien technology existed. The disclosure community cited this as evidence of cover-up activity.

The most useful number in the Manifold alien market cluster is not any of the confirmation probabilities. “Will the US Government make a show of declassifying everything on UFOs/UAPs before 2030?” sits at 44%.

Markets around whether the US ACTUALLY confirms that aliens exist before 2027 hover around 7-8%. Traders think there’s a real chance of an elaborate public performance of transparency, but a much smaller chance the performance amounts to anything.

Traders are also forecasting specifically if the US confirms aliens in 2026, what kind will they be? The leading answer at 49% is Microbial life, with the runner up at 27% being “completely unspecified (US government confidently asserts aliens exist but provides no further information).”

There's also a market on whether the US President or UK Prime Minister will confirm non-human intelligence before end of 2026, sitting at 13% - Keir Starmer apparently included for completeness.

This sits alongside markets on whether the US President themself will confirm extra-terrestrial existence.

Moving on from the politics, we have “Will we have contact with intelligent alien life by 2030?” sits at 5%, roughly the same as the JFK assassination being linked to aliens before 2040.

“Will the first sign of extraterrestrial intelligence be identified as artificial intelligence by 2030?” is at 13%, which is a more interesting question than it gets credit for. “Alien invasion before GTA6?” is at 4%.

The most substantive alien science of the past year happened nowhere near Washington. In April 2025, a Cambridge team using the James Webb Space Telescope announced that the atmosphere of K2-18b, a water-rich planet 124 light-years away, appears to contain dimethyl sulfide, a molecule produced on Earth exclusively by marine microbial life. The detection reached 3-sigma confidence. The lead researcher called it “a revolutionary moment.” Four independent teams reanalyzed the data over the summer and found the signal was probably ethane, or red noise in the mid-infrared, or a real detection that needs more observation time. One analysis found 87.5% of retrieval approaches showed no statistically significant evidence for DMS at all.

“Will K2-18b be generally agreed to harbor alien life by 2027?” is at 5%, with a scientific consensus sitting at the same odds.

This arc is mostly familiar. The phosphine-on-Venus announcement in 2020. The 1996 Martian meteorite bacteria claim. All had similar beginnings. K2-18b received a fraction of the coverage of Obama’s podcast clip.

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has a public bet with skeptic Michael Shermer: $150,000 against $1,000 that alien visitation will not be confirmed by 2030. Markets broadly agree with him. The aliens.gov domain expires in 2027. So does the confirmation market. Neither currently has any content.

Happy Forecasting!
- Above the Fold