FlightAware has taken the prediction market Kalshi to court, alleging that the platform built gambling markets on top of the tracker's data without permission. Kalshi began offering contracts on how many flights would be cancelled across the United States, or at a particular airport, roughly a month ago.
The complaint is about two things being taken rather than one. FlightAware says Kalshi used both its data and its name, and that its branding and figures continued to appear on the platform even after the company demanded they be removed.
Central to the filing is that none of this was ever raised with FlightAware. The company states in the lawsuit that Kalshi never told it the outcomes of these betting markets would be determined using its data, and says it only learned the contracts existed once journalists began writing about them.
Kalshi has not commented; TechCrunch has approached the company.
Platforms of this kind — Kalshi, Polymarket and others — let people wager on future events of almost any description, from election outcomes to how many albums a musician moves in a week. Their vulnerability to manipulation is not theoretical, and their own rules against trading on inside knowledge have not prevented it.
Two cases illustrate the problem. A Polymarket user placed a conspicuous thirty-two thousand dollar bet that Venezuela's president Nicolás Maduro would be out of power by the end of January; the United States military captured him hours afterwards, and the position paid four hundred thousand dollars. Separately, a teleprompter operator at the White House is alleged to have made more than a hundred thousand dollars on Kalshi by trading on advance knowledge of what the president was about to say.
That history underpins FlightAware's sharpest argument. If people can profit from knowing what is coming, the company contends, markets priced on cancelled flights create an incentive to interfere with flights — which puts passengers and airport staff at risk rather than merely costing someone money.
FlightAware has asked for a jury trial. It has not put a figure on the damages it is seeking.
