By Antonina Tupikova · Founder, iGaming Times3 min read
Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James have filed suit against Kalshi, alleging the prediction market platform has operated an unlicensed gambling business in New York since at least 2025, exposing users as young as 18 to betting products that state law reserves for those aged 21 and over. The action demands forfeiture of all illegal gains, consumer restitution, and fines triple the company's unlawful profits.
New York has moved from regulatory warnings to courtroom confrontation, filing a civil lawsuit against KalshiEX LLC in what amounts to the state's most direct challenge yet to the prediction market sector. Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James announced the action jointly, framing it as an effort to enforce consumer protections, close a tax gap, and assert that prediction markets are gambling platforms subject to existing state law regardless of how they describe themselves.
According to the Office of the Attorney General, Kalshi launched in 2021 as a platform allowing users to wager on the outcomes of future events. In 2025 the company expanded into sports, marketing its products as legal sports betting accessible to Americans in all 50 states. The OAG's investigation concluded that these markets meet New York's legal definition of gambling because the outcomes are uncertain and outside a bettor's control, or turn on an element of chance, and that Kalshi has operated without the New York State Gaming Commission licence required of any such platform.
The lawsuit asks the court for an order stopping Kalshi from continuing to operate as an unlicensed gambling business in New York. It also requests forfeiture of all illegal gains, distribution of restitution to harmed consumers, and civil fines set at three times the profits Kalshi generated through its unlicensed activity. The tripling provision reflects a statutory penalty designed to deter deliberate non-compliance rather than inadvertent regulatory oversight.
The underage-access allegation sits at the core of the state's harm argument. The OAG contends that Kalshi's platform has been available to users between the ages of 18 and 20, a cohort New York law explicitly excludes from mobile sports wagering, which carries a minimum age of 21. Attorney General James cited recent research linking youth gambling to psychological distress, financial difficulty, and elevated risk of gambling-related harm in adulthood.
New York's move against Kalshi is the culmination of a series of escalating interventions rather than a first strike. The New York State Gaming Commission issued a cease-and-desist order against Kalshi in October 2025. Kalshi sought federal court intervention to block New York's enforcement, but a federal judge denied that bid, clearing the path for today's action. In April 2026 Attorney General James sued Coinbase and Gemini for operating what the state characterised as illegal prediction-market gambling platforms. Governor Hochul in the same month signed an executive order prohibiting state employees from using prediction markets for insider trading.
The state has also been active on adjacent fronts. In January 2026 the Attorney General sued Valve, the video game developer, for allegedly facilitating illegal gambling through games popular with children. In June 2025 the OAG shut down 26 online sweepstakes casinos. Taken together, the pattern suggests a deliberate enforcement strategy targeting the grey-market fringe of digital gambling, with Kalshi now at its centre.
The New York action arrives as Kalshi faces legal pressure in several other jurisdictions. Michigan courts have ordered the company to halt sports event contracts, a Washington court found it likely ran illegal gambling, and Nevada pursued contempt proceedings after geofencing disputes before reaching a settlement. The multi-state litigation map now forms one of the most consequential legal contests in the US prediction-market sector.
The Tax and Fiscal Argument Is More Than a Political Talking Point
New York's insistence on Kalshi's failure to pay taxes deserves to be read as more than rhetorical padding. Licensed mobile sports betting operators in the state are subject to a tax rate that directs revenue to public schools, youth sports initiatives, and problem-gambling services. An unlicensed platform operating at scale in the same market benefits from a structural cost advantage: no licensing fees, no compliance overhead, and no tax liability. If New York's allegation is correct that Kalshi has served a meaningful volume of users in the state, the unlicensed revenue represents a direct transfer away from those public programmes. The fiscal lens also provides the state with a politically durable argument that cuts across the more technical debate about whether prediction markets are legally gambling: regardless of the definitional question, the tax-avoidance consequence is concrete and easy to communicate.
The Minimum-Age Question Could Be the Most Legally Durable Claim
Of all the allegations in the complaint, the underage-access charge may prove the hardest for Kalshi to defend. The CFTC, which Kalshi has used as its federal regulatory anchor, sets an 18-year minimum age for designated contract markets. New York's mobile sports wagering framework requires participants to be at least 21. If Kalshi relied on the federal standard to set its own age threshold without geo-filtering New York users accordingly, it created a direct conflict with state consumer-protection law that exists independently of any debate about whether prediction markets are gambling. Courts considering the jurisdictional question between state gambling law and federal commodity law have not uniformly sided with federal pre-emption, and the age-gap argument gives New York a narrow, well-evidenced claim that does not require resolving the broader definitional dispute to succeed.
The Regulatory Gap Between CFTC Perimeter and State Law Is Now a Litigation Battleground
Kalshi's core defence across all state actions has been that its status as a CFTC-regulated designated contract market pre-empts state gambling law. New York, like Michigan, Washington, and Nevada before it, disputes that position. The CFTC's own rulemaking process for prediction markets and the congressional hearings prompted by the sector's rapid growth have not yet produced a settled federal framework that would definitively resolve the state-versus-federal question. Until they do, companies operating in the prediction-market space face the prospect of litigating the same jurisdictional argument in each state that chooses to enforce. For Kalshi, which is simultaneously targeting a $40 billion valuation and managing lawsuits across multiple states, the cost and reputational burden of that litigation environment is itself a strategic consideration. New York's suit, backed by the governor and attorney general jointly, signals that the state intends to be among the most aggressive participants in that fight.
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