Some World Cup bettors woke up to a rude surprise on Sunday. A notification from Coinbase pushed fake news about Norway beating Brazil 3-2 in a knockout stage. The crypto exchange claimed Erling Haaland had scored the two winning goals.
Except the match hadn’t started.
It was delayed. Bad weather at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey put things on hold. Coinbase’s own prediction market page said as much. But the AI didn’t care.
Hours later, the actual game played out. The result? Norway won. Haaland did indeed score two goals. The score was 2-1, though. Not 3-2.
That missing goal matters. Especially when people have wagered serious money on it. We’re seeing gambling addiction spike among young people. Online sportsbooks and prediction markets make it too easy to blow a paycheck on a whim.
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Coinbase isn’t just for crypto anymore. The US public market giant now lets you trade stocks, derivatives, and even predictions via its partnership with Kalshi. It’s a big leap for a company known mainly for Bitcoin.
Screenshots of that hallucinated headline went viral. People were angry. Calling it dangerous. Irresponsible.
CEO Brian Armstrong saw the backlash on X. Said he was “taking a look with the team.”
When asked for a real statement, Coinbase pointed to Max Branzburg, their head of consumer products. His reply tried to spin the failure. He claimed they fixed the story. Said they’d make updates to prevent it happening again.
“And hey — it turns out Norway did赢 and Haaland did score two goals”
Wait. Did Branzburg actually think the AI knew the future?
Maybe. Or maybe he just wanted a chuckle out of a disaster.
The AI knew nothing. Large language models can’t predict the future. They don’t have precognition. They have math. Lots of it.
LLMs scrape huge amounts of data. They look for patterns. When you ask a question they can’t answer, they don’t say “I don’t know.” They make stuff up. That’s called hallucination. It’s a technical term for a total fabrication.
Ask an LLM about a game that hasn’t happened. It looks at Haaland. It knows he scores a lot. It knows Norway plays Brazil. It calculates a plausible outcome. 3-2 seems likely enough for the pattern matcher. It churns it out as fact.
Haaland is one of the best. The score made sense.
Until it didn’t.
