Meta is planning to launch its own prediction market app to compete with companies like Kalshi and Polymarket in a booming sector that some analysts project could become a $1 trillion industry in the coming years.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has instructed a team to start building a standalone app called Arena where people can guess the outcome of real-world events, according to two employees who were not authorized to speak publicly about the project.

Meta's plans to build a prediction market app were first reported by The New York Times.

NPR obtained internal Meta documents about the effort that have not been previously reported.

The documents describe how instead of wagering real money, users of the new app will receive "a daily virtual allotment" of "play money" that can be used to bet on "the outcome of future events."

On the most popular prediction market apps, Kalshi and Polymarket, traders bet billions of dollars a week on everything from what Rotten Tomatoes score a forthcoming movie will receive to when Israel will drop bombs on Iran.

While it is unclear what range of topics Meta hopes to cover with its prediction market, the company is planning to use artificial intelligence to drive the service, according to the internal documents.

The new app, which has been codenamed "Antwerp" and "FBForecast," will use Llama, the company's large language model, to automatically generate questions from trending topics. Meta's AI will also make "personalized market recommendations" to users who download the app, according to the documents.

That same artificial intelligence will resolve markets, according to the documents. In other words, AI will have the final say over whether something did or did not happen. As on Kalshi and Polymarket, the wagering happens around "yes" or "no" questions. This AI-driven resolving process will happen in "near real-time," the documents state.

In 2020, Meta released an app called Forecast, a crowdsourced prediction market app where people could guess about what might happen in the world, including predictions about the course of the pandemic. The app was wound down two years later. The internal documents NPR reviewed cited "the operational cost of manual question curation" as the reason Meta shut that effort down. The documents say the new app now under development is a "rebuild" of that app.

When a prototype app is finished, Meta employees will test it before its full public launch for both iPhones and Android devices, the documents state. An exact release date was not specified.

Meta declined to comment.

Developing a prediction market without real monetary stakes may seem counterintuitive, since the hope of making a handsome profit has drawn millions of users to Kalshi and Polymarket.

But gaming lawyer Daniel Wallach, who watches the prediction market industry closely, said releasing the app without the ability to wager money could allow Meta more time to apply for a license to operate from federal regulators and provide breathing room for the contested legal landscape to become more settled.

"We're clearly in legal limbo," said Wallach, noting the more than 30 pending lawsuits over the legality of prediction markets. "And we might not have a clear answer for another year or two."

Meta moving forward with its own prediction market service makes it the biggest-yet Silicon Valley player to enter the fray, even as questions over market manipulation, insider trading and how the markets can reshape reality or create perverse incentives continue to plague the sector.

Nonetheless, the industry has the backing of the Trump administration, with officials beginning the process of rewriting the federal rules overseeing prediction markets, which were shunned for decades by regulators.

"The prediction markets of today are a novel creation that only arrived at the dawn of the second Trump administration," Wallach said. "And it's launched all these legal fights over whether Congress ever intended for this kind of activity to be regulated by the CFTC," he said, referring to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the agency overseeing prediction market sites.

Meta is just the latest player hoping to tap into the surging popularity of prediction markets.

Traditional sports gambling sites, like DraftKings and FanDuel, have released their own prediction market services. President Trump's TruthSocial has announced prediction market plans. And more than 70 other companies have launched prediction market projects or services, according to Event Horizon, a newsletter that tracks the prediction market industry.

More than 3 billion people use at least one Meta app every day, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. But the company has struggled to get new standalone apps off the ground.