Kate Knibbs

Kate Knibbs focuses on how prediction markets, AI systems, and online grey economies are turning technology into a contested arena for money, media, and power at WIRED. She is a senior writer at the masthead, covering prediction markets, the future of media, and how AI is changing the internet. Her background includes earlier roles at digital culture and technology outlets such as The Ringer and Gizmodo, which underpins her attention to how technical systems play out in everyday culture. Across her recent work, she follows the friction between innovation and regulation, tracing the human consequences of speculative tech.

Prediction Markets and Regulatory Battles

Knibbs has carved out a distinct niche as one of the main reporters chronicling modern prediction markets, from banned offshore platforms to regulated exchanges tied to US politics and corporate events. She reports on Americans trading billions of dollars on Polymarket’s banned offshore platform, unpacking how a supposedly experimental market has become a high‑stakes venue for political and financial bets. In multiple stories, she follows US government investigations into Polymarket trades, showing how regulators scrutinize bets tied to matters like Biden pardons, potential wars, and insider trading at major tech firms.

Her coverage includes pieces on Kalshi and other exchanges, documenting lifetime bans for public figures, insider trading allegations against candidates and government employees, and state‑level moves to bar officials from trading on prediction markets. She returns to the theme of legal and tax uncertainty, writing about the difficulty of filing taxes on prediction market winnings and the broader regulatory confusion around whether these platforms are gambling products or legitimate financial tools.

Across these stories, she combines document‑driven reporting with interviews and case studies, focusing on traders, engineers, soldiers, and media companies entangled in the markets she covers.

AI, Newsrooms, and the Future of Truth

Another through‑line in Knibbs’ work is how AI reshapes information, journalism, and public trust. She writes about AI reporters that are already breaking news, examining automated newsrooms, the humans who design them, and the risks of outsourcing editorial judgment to software.

In coverage of the Future of Truth and similar projects, she probes how authors and technologists use AI in longform work, surfacing misunderstandings and misrepresentations about what the technology actually did. Her reporting on “AI slop” describes an internet saturated with synthetic content, explaining how cheap generative tools flood feeds with fake‑happy material that blurs the line between information and marketing. She also covers AI’s impact on work, including pieces on AI taking over “cursed” jobs and live discussions about how automation is changing everyday employment. In science and security stories, she explores why AI is unlikely to wipe out humanity with bioweapons, drawing on scientific assessment to place new fears in the context of more immediate risks.

Across this cluster of work, she links technical capabilities to newsroom practice, copyright and labor disputes, and the larger question of who controls truth in an AI‑mediated media environment.

Scams, Health Hustles, and the Internet’s Dark Corners

Knibbs regularly turns to the murkier edges of online life, reporting on scams, fraud, and health fads that thrive in the gaps between regulation and hype. She covers online romance scams and adoption scams, including livestream replays that take readers inside the world of people who exploit intimacy and bureaucracy through digital channels.

Her stories on streaming fraud show traders and platforms colliding, as in coverage of a Kalshi trader raising concerns that prompt Spotify to confirm manipulation in its streaming ecosystem. She writes extensively about peptides and GLP‑1 drugs, from viral “bodega peptides” that are not what they claim to be, to the perimenopause industrial complex, to the broader peptide and GLP‑1 cash grab unfolding across online pharmacies and wellness entrepreneurs.

These pieces track how medicalized language and influencer marketing turn experimental or prescription treatments into mass‑market products, often with minimal oversight.

She also reports on the internet’s infrastructure and independent media, including the peril facing a major archiving tool and the way Democracy Now! serves as a blueprint for indie media operations. Taken together, this work shows a reporter who follows money and manipulation through scams, niche drugs, and platform dynamics, rather than treating technology coverage as purely about hardware or corporate strategy.

Books, Longform, and Tech Culture

Alongside her news reporting, Knibbs maintains a strong books and culture strand. She leads WIRED’s Book Club, guiding readers through contemporary writing about tech, the internet, science, and the future, and using these selections to frame larger questions about how societies absorb new technologies. Her essays on novels like M.T.

Anderson’s “Feed” look back at earlier imaginings of always‑on, ad‑driven networks and argue that many of their warnings feel newly relevant. She writes book‑adjacent features, such as profiles of charismatic scammers and explorations of media organizations that redefine independent coverage in a digital age.

Within this literary and longform work, she treats fiction and narrative nonfiction as reporting tools, using them to illuminate how technology influences identity, politics, and culture beyond the immediate news cycle.