Coinbase AI push notification hallucinated World Cup winner

Coinbase sent a push notification about Norway beating Brazil in their World Cup match yesterday hours before the result of the match was actually decided. The company’s AI hallucinated the “news” and, because Coinbase employees have permitted non-fact-checked push notifications in the first place, the computer blasted it onto the phones of countless customers. Despite Coinbase’s 3-2 score turning out to be wrong, Norway did actually emerge victorious, winning 2-1 against the five-time world champions with Norway and Manchester City striker Erling Haaland scoring the goals.

Disconcertingly, Coinbase’s AI had also made up commentary about Haaland being the goalscorer before either of his actual goals hit the net. Obviously, there are only two possible team names for the winner of a soccer game, so Coinbase guessing this isn’t particularly remarkable. Haaland is also Norway’s leading goalscorer, so he was also pretty likely to be th man to get the goals.

Still, Coinbase’s push notification was enough to generate hundreds of thousands of views worth of social media controversy. Did Coinbase doxx its first bitcoin mortgage customer? Read more: Brian Armstrong sold more stock in 12 months than Coinbase’s Q1 loss Coinbase’s AI reported its guess as fact Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the US, doesn’t run its own sportsbook.

Instead, it routes sports prediction markets through Kalshi’s federally regulated event-contract platform. The exchange rolled that partnership out to all 50 states in January. The AI notification pulls in data from Kalshi, occasionally framing sharp market swings as so-called news.

Unfortunately, media often reports on the odds of prediction market betting lines as though these percentages are the odds of an event occurring in real life. In reality, prediction markets are similar to binary options contracts and gambling, trivially easy to manipulate with relatively small amounts of money, and disproportionately reward market-makers. Concerned