Certain innovators are working to develop agents that can place bets rather than just provide suggestions, yet advancement has proven difficult. Tom Fleetham, formerly the head of business development at Zilliqa, a blockchain platform, was involved with an AI gambling agent named Ava, designed to choose horse race winners. “She had strong analysis, strong outcomes,” he states. “The challenge was in actually executing the bets.”
The company faced difficulties with Ava’s capacity to efficiently place bets through crypto wallets, as per Fleetham. “It took ages,” he remarks. “We gave up.”
YouTube features numerous guides on creating and managing gambling agents that place wagers for people. However, these services do not appear to be generating new millionaires—or even thousandaires. Siraj Raval, a YouTuber focused on earning money through AI, has shared a side project called WagerGPT on his channel. He asserts that the tool can place bets and charges $199 monthly for access. “Eight months ago, I implemented a function for WagerGPT to place wagers. Now it’s doing that full-time for users,” Raval states. Raval mentions that WagerGPT examines over 40 sportsbooks and “recognizes variables that humans cannot.” Raval invited WIRED to a Telegram group he claimed was populated with WagerGPT users, but the channel was largely inactive, with recent messages questioning the status of the service. “It’s completely inactive,” claims Pete Sanchez, a participant. “A waste of money.”
Since AI agents cannot manage conventional bank accounts, most automated betting solutions focus on sports gambling platforms and prediction markets that accept cryptocurrency, allowing many agents to utilize crypto wallets. One of the major mainstream initiatives enabling AI agents to perform various transactions for individuals is Coinbase’s AgentKit. It envisions a scenario where agents can carry out multiple financial transactions, ranging from purchasing airline tickets to trading crypto and making sports bets. Lincoln Murr, an AI product manager at Coinbase, notes that many of AgentKit’s initial applications “were speculative” and remarked that he hadn’t witnessed significant success. “How lucrative these agents actually are, I don’t know,” he says. The project he’s most interested in is Sire, which defines itself as “an agentic sports-betting hedge fund” and operates as a DAO. (In the context of crypto, DAO refers to decentralized autonomous organization—a community owned by members using blockchain-based agreements). “That’s the path we’re following,” Murr states.
Sire, formerly known as DraiftKing but renamed for legal reasons, is set to relaunch. Max Sebti, CEO of its parent company, Score, mentions that the company utilizes public and private data and “computer vision technology observing the games” to gather the most up-to-date information for identifying winning bets. Score’s business model is a sophisticated blend of crypto and gambling. Ultimately, the company plans to facilitate USD transfers into a wallet, converting them into a stablecoin. Sire’s AI agents will then aggregate this money with other customers’ funds to place bets on decentralized sportsbooks and prediction markets accepting crypto, such as Polymarket. Sebti indicates that the agents will redistribute winnings to the community. Sebti characterizes the initiative as “a stable, hedge-fund-like product.” Anyone can contribute funds to a wallet, but withdrawing winnings necessitates paying a “performance fee” to Sire, which can be diminished by acquiring the company’s crypto token. The service exits beta this month.
