Prediction market platform Kalshi has signed up to the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG), despite claiming it is not a gambling operator. 

The company has grown exponentially since launching sports markets last year. After starting with a market on the Super Bowl, it now offers wagering on all major events, including esports. 

State regulators have protested against its expansion, filing numerous lawsuits against the company, alleging it is offering unlicensed sports betting. Kalshi, however, argues it is not a gambling platform. 

Yet, joining the NCPG would appear to be an admission that it is indeed offering users the chance to gamble. 

Responsible Trading, Not Gambling

The NCPG said it has created a new membership subcategory specifically for Kalshi. It becomes the first financial services & trading category member. 

This allows the NCPG to refrain from calling Kalshi a gambling company. In the press release, the organization notes that it “maintains a neutral position on the legality of specific gambling, wagering, or prediction products.”

The organization is quite explicit in its mission; however, which is to “mitigate harm and lessen the personal, social, and economic consequences of problem gambling.”

Heather L. Maurer, Executive Director of NCPG was careful not to use the word gambling when commenting on Kalshi, stating, “Innovation and responsibility can and must evolve together. Kalshi’s engagement demonstrates a commitment to mitigating harm before it occurs and ensuring support resources are accessible when they are needed.”

Could Kalshi’s Commitment Be Used Against It?

Kalshi has committed to investing $2 million over the next two years in the NCPG to aid its fight against problem gambling. 

“At Kalshi, we believe in the power of prediction markets, and we are sensitive to the fact that they, like any financial trading products, come with risks,” said Tarek Mansour, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi. “As prediction markets continue to evolve, we are deeply committed to setting a new standard for responsible trading by investing in the tools, education, and protections needed to promote healthy participation and customer safety and hope that over time all trading platforms with significant retail participation follow suit.”

While its membership may be applauded in some quarters as a sign that the company is taking responsibility, it could also hurt its chances in court cases that hinge on whether judges see it as a gambling platform. 

The line between trading and gambling has become increasingly blurred. Over 90% of Kalshi’s trading volume comes from sports contracts. Esports accounts for a significant portion of that volume, as do parlays. 

In a court case arguing for the legality of election prediction markets, a Kalshi lawyer admitted that contracts on the Super Bowl or other sporting events would come under the category of gaming. The Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) says that contracts that fall under the category of gaming may be prohibited by the CFTC. 

The lawyer’s words have been used against Kalshi in legal battles, with many state regulators citing this as evidence that sports prediction markets are gambling. 

In joining the US’s primary nonprofit for tackling gambling harm, Kalshi may just have given opposing lawyers a new argument to use against it in court.

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As AI agents grow ever more capable, enterprises racing to put them to work across applications, workflows, and products face a new challenge: ensuring an agent does what it’s supposed to do when it’s deployed across different environments.

Microsoft is trying to solve this problem with a new open source standard called Agent Control Specification (ACS) that aims to give developers a more consistent and granular way to control what AI agents are allowed to do.

The specification essentially lets developer, compliance, and security teams define their own policies for agents to follow. The rules can define what the agent may do, what it must not do, when a human should approve an action, and what evidence should be logged for later review. These policy files are checked at several “interception points” when the agent is off performing a task to make sure it stays within the guardrails.

The spec comes as developers are improvising ways to control what their AI sees and does, especially with conversations focusing on AI workflows going wrong due to tool misuse, or unintended actions that result in cascading failures.

Today, developers might specify instructions in a system prompt, add custom checks in the application code, or use classifiers to catch problematic inputs and outputs. Those approaches work, but they often leave companies with fragmented controls that are hard to audit and harder to reuse across different frameworks, interfaces, and systems.

ACS aims to integrate those controls into a common governance layer. Microsoft says the specification can be used to check whether an agent is sticking to guardrails at multiple points in its workflow — before it receives input, before it calls a tool, after a tool returns a result, and before the final response is sent to the user. A policy may allow an action, block it, redact sensitive information, or even ask a person to approve it.

Developers can also insert classifiers for inputs and outputs to categorize information, predict outcomes, or determine how an agent should respond; add LLMs with prompts to act as a “judge” for policies; and logic for checking tool calls, tool selection, input accuracy, output usage, and responses.

And because these policies can be written as single files, they can be bundled with agents, allowing a security policy to follow an agent across different frameworks and environments.

ACS is shipping as an SDK with plug-ins for LangChain, the OpenAI Agents SDK, the Anthropic Agents SDK, AutoGen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, Microsoft.Extensions.AI, MCP tools, and more.

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An hour into Entropy, the new turn-based RPG from Dread Delusion studio Lovely Hellplace, I stumbled on three randos frenziedly interrogating a severed head. In theory, the head belonged to a demon, one of the hellspawn who had recently laid the realm to waste, but the bystanders seemed… ambiguous on this front. I wasn’t really in a position to judge: by this point in the demo, my party had already hacked a number of arms off, and in any case, many of Entropy’s demons are rogue body parts to begin with. One of the early enemies is a walking pair of lungs, for example. You can shoot it in the windpipe to stop it casting spells.

Entropy is sort of a classic Final Fantasy game – there’s an overworld with (thankfully infrequent) pop-up encounters, and the combat music puts me in mind of the spidermech boss from FF8, specifically – but it dunks that parallel into a bucket of rust, piss and fungus. The landscape is a mycelial web slowly devouring a few, bloody-minded tufts of PS1 masonry, where toadstools tower over castle walls. Everything here from the savegame shrines to the innkeepers seems toxic and untrustworthy and horribly short on sleep.

Not long after the business with the head, I visited a “soul garden”. Once upon a time, a deity tended that garden, creating an earthly sanctuary for the dead. But then the god either went mad or was corrupted, and the locals started burying people they loathed there as punishment, and now you have to navigate a forest full of anguished ghosts. Mere blades and arrows won’t harm these spectres; to defeat them, you must slaughter giant snails and scrape “soul moss” from their shells. The snails are worryingly humanoid. I’m quite glad Entropy doesn’t have much voicework in battle, because I’d sure hate to hear these things scream.

It perhaps goes without saying that your party members are not the usual band of heroes. They are a bunch of permakillable mercenaries and refugees – cowards and failures, propping up bars or heaped by the road. They all look like gargoyles carved from sewage, with stained eyes and teeth and hugely knotted hands clutching at salvaged hilts. I do love Entropy’s portrait art; there’s a fallen guard in the prologue with half his torso missing, one eye staring at you calmly over a palatial expanse of rib and muscle – an incredible investment of art for a character destined to expire a few sentences later, but it certainly sets the tone.

The battling, meanwhile, is a familiar brew: melee fighters in the front row; archers, gunners and wizards to the rear. There’s a turn order bar on the left, with more powerful special abilities delaying a character’s turn. There are status effects such as stun and poison, and the opportunity to target limbs to stop people moving about or hitting as hard. A few enemies wear armour that has to be Pierced or smashed asunder using Blunt weapons. I’m not blown away by any of it, so far, but it’s substantial enough to keep me occupied when I’m not boggling at the art direction.

I’m also enjoying the writing, which is steeped in theatre. Your character is a wandering troubadour with few prospects, bending the boards many leagues from home. The opening stat customisation is dramatised as an attempt to remember your lines, while recovering from a hangover. One of the initial demons – a persistent nemesis, I suspect – quotes Shakespeare at you in what I hope is a knowingly obnoxious way; they remind me of the Klingon general from Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. Later dialogue weaves in bits of context, but seldom goes beyond a few sentences of backstory; it whets the appetite rather than stuffing lore down your throat.

It’s all quite promising, basically! I need to go back and see if I can interact with that head. Assuming it can talk, the head probably has opinions on whether it used to belong to a demon. Try the demo for yourself via Steam, and look out for the early access release on August 18th.

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