‘No more’: Washington state sues Kalshi, says prediction market is illegal gambling
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown is suing the prediction market platform Kalshi, alleging that the company is violating state gambling and consumer protection laws by operating an online betting service where users can bet on sports, elections, wars and other events.
The civil lawsuit, filed Friday in King County Superior Court, seeks to shut down Kalshi’s operations in Washington, restore lost money to state residents and consider civil penalties.
It is the latest in a growing number of federal actions against the New York company, which faces more than 20 charges. Earlier this month, the Arizona attorney general filed a criminal case against Kalshi, believed to be the first such case against the prediction market.
The Washington state complaint highlights a Kalshi ad in which one person wrote to another that he “found a way to bet on the NFL even though we live in Washington,” which the state says shows the company willfully violated state law.
GeekWire has contacted Kalshi for comment. The company has called similar legal actions in other states “unwarranted.”
Kalshi entered the sports betting market in early 2025 and now offers spread bets, over/under wagers and tip bets on college and professional games — all typical sports book products that are illegal in Washington outside of states, the complaint says.
But the complaint notes that Kalshi’s contributions go beyond sports. The platform allows users to bet on the total number of measles cases in a given year, what witnesses will say during a child-trafficking trial, and whether Iran’s supreme leader will be removed from power.
The company also offers “speech markets” where bettors bet on certain words a TV host or politician will say during a broadcast, the complaint noted.
“Kalshi wants people to bet on almost anything that can happen in life – election results, Supreme Court cases, even wars,” Washington AG Brown said in a statement. “As they push forward with this bleak vision of the future, they line their pockets and pat themselves on the back for skirting Washington’s gambling laws.
The complaint also focuses on Kalshi’s marketing to young people, saying the company targeted users between the ages of 18 and 21 and promoted influential college students to promote the platform. The state says Kalshi briefly tried to hire a 15-year-old promoter.
On his Instagram account, Kalshi once described his platform as “kind of addictive,” according to the complaint.
The industry has also come under scrutiny after bettors on rival platform Polymarket made six-figure profits betting on the capture of Nicolás Maduro and the assassination of Iran’s top leader.
Kalshi, established in 2018, is a designated contract market regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The company has argued in some cases that its federal status preempts the country’s gambling laws, a position that has been supported by the Trump administration and CFTC senior leadership.
That argument produced mixed results in court. Federal judges in New Jersey and Tennessee at least temporarily blocked state enforcement against Kalshi, while district court rulings in Massachusetts and Ohio sided with state regulators in insisting that Kalshi obtain traditional sports betting licenses.
A bipartisan bill introduced this week by Sens. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and John Curtis (R-Utah) would ban sports betting on prediction markets.
Washington has some of the most restrictive gambling laws in the country. The state constitution banned gambling when Washington became a state in 1889, and the legislature banned Internet gambling in 2006. The exception is the sports wagers placed manually in national casinos.
