When Carson Szeder turned five dollars into more than a thousand by betting on an NFL game last year, he knew he was onto something major. “Definitely my biggest win,” he says. He hadn’t scored because he was especially deft at football analytics—or because he was particularly lucky. Instead, he says he used an AI program to help him decide how to gamble.
Since a federal ban on sports betting was struck down in the United States seven years ago, gambling on the internet has exploded in popularity. Last year, Americans spent over $150 billion on sports-related wagers, with many placing bets on their phones rather than boarding a flight to Vegas. The American Gaming Association reported a nearly 24 percent jump in popularity in sports betting in the US in 2024, and the obsession shows no signs of slowing down.
The mania has coincided with a modern AI gold rush. Now, the race is on to combine the economy-shaking pursuits, and a cottage industry has emerged to give bots the ability to place bets. So far, there’s no huge wave of newly minted millionaires sitting atop piles of money won using AI agents. But some fortune hunters are already jostling to establish AI-powered services that will turn ordinary gamblers into winners.
Take Szeder, founder of the AI gambling startup MonsterBet, says his tools give customers an edge. “We have some people who are probably hitting around 56 to 60 percent of the time, myself included,” he claims. (Standard odds are around 52 percent.) Szeder, a computer science major, first started building sports betting algorithms as an undergrad, at the behest of his college buddies who loved to gamble. He began incorporating AI into these experiments at the beginning of 2025, when he created an assistant called MonsterGPT to select bets on professional sports in the US. It uses projection models he designed combined with information scraped from across the internet. MonsterGPT accesses web scrapers through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a process that allows AI tools to incorporate new data from external sources on top of their training materials. Now, Szeder is trying to turn his hobby into a full-blown business, which he promotes on social platforms with posts like “Here’s How I Made $1.2K From My Sports Betting Software Yesterday.” He charges $77 a month for access to MonsterGPT and other tools.
There’s no shortage of competition. Rithmm, a Massachusetts-based startup, charges $30 for its basic “AI-powered sports intelligence” package. A firm called JuiceReel offers a free basic app for the same purpose. Some of these companies offer AI agents that select picks but don’t actually place bets on behalf of users. Others simply market themselves as betting-tip services that happen to use AI without bothering to mention agents at all.
This is the route that larger, more established players in the industry tend to take. This spring, FanDuel launched a chatbot called Ace, which offers analysis and tips on certain sports but does not allow for automated wagering. “The power to place bets should always stay in the hands of our customers themselves—not bots, AI agents, or anything (or anyone) else,” says FanDuel vice president of product innovation and transformation Jon Sadow.