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"No matter what they call themselves, prediction markets like Kalshi are gambling platforms, plain and simple," said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a press release announcing the lawsuit. "By ignoring our laws, Kalshi is running an illegal operation and harming New Yorkers in the process."

New York Governor Kathy Hochul speaks during the grand opening of the Urban League Empowerment Center by the National Urban League in Harlem in New York City, on Nov. 12, 2025.

Charly Triballeau | AFP | Getty Images

Governor Kathy Hochul in the press release said the state is taking the action to stop what it views as illegal behavior and bring the company into compliance with New York law. The lawsuit is seeking a permanent injunction against Kalshi. 

Kalshi, which has its headquarters offices in New York City, expressed disappointment with the decision by the state. 

"It's sad to see this type of political theater from the leadership in our own state," a Kalshi spokesperson said in a statement. "States can't just shut down a federally licensed exchange… We love New York, we love New Yorkers, and New Yorkers love our product."

The suit by the state is also seeking a total restitution to users who have placed trades on the platform, a $100,000 penalty for each attempt to offer sports wagering, and another penalty three times the amount the company has gained while allegedly operating in violation of New York law. The state estimates that could total $36 billion.

Kalshi originally sued New York state in October after the state's Gaming Commission sent a cease and desist letter to the company. Earlier this month, a judge for the Southern District of New York denied the company's request for a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order against the commission. 

A supporter checks the gambling site 'Kalshi" just before State Assembly member, Alex Bores (D-NY) gives a speech to supporters at his watch party at The Freehand Hotel after conceding the congressional race to Micah Lasher who will replace Rep Jerry Nadler (D-NY) in NY's 12th Congressional District on June 23, 2026 in New York City.

Laura Brett | Getty Images

The same judge denied a request by Kalshi earlier this month for an injunction pending an appeal. 

"It's an unhinged, and extraordinarily egregious piece of lawfare that's designed to shut down not only some aspects of prediction markets but all aspects of prediction markets," said Brian Quintenz, a Kalshi board member, about the latest move by New York in a Friday appearance on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." "It's really just an extraordinary piece of overreach from the New York state."

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which sees itself as the federal regulator for prediction markets, filed for a temporary restraining order against enforcement actions by New York just before the state's lawsuit was announced. That comes after the CFTC in April sued the state, requesting a permanent injunction from enforcing its state laws on commission-registered platforms. 

"Rather than seek reasoned answers from the courts, Letitia James and New York seek to force an unprecedented sudden shutdown of prediction markets nationwide," CFTC Chairman Michael Selig wrote in a post on X. "The CFTC has already sued to stop this and will continue to defend its jurisdiction."

States across the country are locked in battles with the federal government and platforms over prediction markets, which have seen their volumes surge as their sports-related event contracts have become popular with retail traders. 

Kalshi — along with other prediction market platforms — and the CFTC believe all event contracts are swaps, and thus are exclusively regulated by the commission. However, states across the country believe the sports offerings are equivalent to sports betting, which is regulated by them. 

44 state attorneys General on Monday sent a letter to the CFTC, claiming that the commission has no right to regulate sports-related event contracts, as part of a public comment period for the agency's first draft of regulations on prediction markets. 

In a statement, the American Gaming Association — which has fought the rise of prediction markets across the country to defend traditional casino and gambling interests — praised the lawsuit from New York.

"We applaud the State of New York for taking this important and necessary action today to uphold the rule of law, protect consumers, and defend the nearly 70,000 New York jobs supported by the legal gaming industry," AGA president and CEO Bill Miller said in the statement.

While New York cited Kalshi's sports offering as the reason for its lawsuit, the state also went further. It claims in the lawsuit that the company's elections, culture and some other event contract offerings also put it in contradiction with the state's laws. 

Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment.

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But they're part of the experience inside Virgin Atlantic's new invite-only "Royal Box" — an exclusive lounge-within-a-lounge where I spent an afternoon on a plush red sofa sipping a "Drama Queen" cocktail and watching red-tailed jets taxi across London Heathrow Airport.

Hidden behind frosted glass and a velvet rope barrier in the corner of Virgin's Clubhouse lounge, the Royal Box opened at Terminal 3 in March 2026. This is the second location; the first opened in Los Angeles last year.

Ahead of a tour of the new space, Virgin Atlantic's vice president of brand and marketing, Sophie Woodford, told me that the Royal Box wasn't created to address overcrowding — a challenge some airlines have faced as more travelers gain access through credit cards and loyalty programs.

Instead, she said, it was designed to meet growing demand for more personalized experiences.

"It's all about creating elevated touch points and making the end-to-end experience more personalized," Woodford said. "Invite-only spaces are just one way of doing that."

While the concept is new to Virgin, it reflects a broader industry trend: Airlines are increasingly using innovative lounges to court deep-pocketed customers amid booming premium travel demand.

Delta has its bougie Delta One Lounge — complete with a sit-down, multi-course restaurant — and Finnair has a "Platinum Corner" within its business-class lounge for top-status flyers. Qantas' invite-only Chairman's Lounge is reserved for high-profile figures, including politicians, CEOs, and celebrities.

Woodford said that although the Royal Box is invite-only, that doesn't mean only VIPs: "Part of the design was for celebrities, but we also use it for other occasions: a birthday, anniversary, or people traveling with Virgin for the first time."

That means anyone with access to the Clubhouse — including Upper Class passengers and top-tier loyalty members of Virgin and its partners — could find themselves inside.

Here's what the Royal Box is like and how to get in.

It felt more like a private club than an airport lounge

The Royal Box, dressed in the brand's bold red color scheme, is quintessential Virgin.

A plush red velvet sofa is wrapped around a custom-made table that opens to reveal coupe glasses, artisan chocolate bars, sweets, and the airline's famous Wilbur and Orville salt-and-pepper shakers.

Known as the "Cabinet of Curiosities," it was designed "to feel like a James Bond table" with secret compartments revealing different treats depending on the customer and occasion, according to Woodford.

"If we know something about you, then we may amp that up and have special touches," she said.

The cocoon-like room makes the most of its limited space by using every windowsill. On one surface, you'll find a Crosley record player with the "Pretty Vacant" vinyl from the Sex Pistols, nodding to the brand's Virgin Records heritage.

If you're more plane-spotter than punk rocker, gilded binoculars with red detailing and a mini telescope allow you to take in the runway views and identify each of Virgin's "Flying Icons" on the aircraft noses.

Shelves in the corner celebrate various forms of royalty.

Front and center is a handwritten note, dated 1993, from Princess Diana to Richard Branson, the cofounder of the Virgin Group.

Framed photos of David Bowie and English fashion designer Vivienne Westwood sit alongside.

Much like the rest of the Clubhouse, the dining service is à la carte, served in your own private space by a waiter. There's also the option to order via a QR code.

The menu is the same, with the exception of the exclusive Drama Queen cocktail — a pink-hued concoction of tequila, strawberry, lemon, and Champagne — topped with glittering edible flowers.

Guests can also order top-shelf alcohol from the Clubhouse, such as Laurent-Perrier Champagne and Grey Goose vodka, as well as non-alcoholic drinks like soda and tea.

You don't have to be famous to earn an invite

The question on everyone's lips is: How can you secure an invite? Woodford said you have as much chance as the next passenger.

While many other lounges reserve such spaces for top-tier members, the Royal Box is designed for a single group of passengers, with no fixed criteria: "We try not to set too hard-and-fast rules," she said.

Woodford said Virgin intentionally avoids strict rules for the Royal Box because it wants as many people as possible to experience it.

Staff is encouraged to fill the space rather than leave it empty, whether that's to celebrate a special occasion or, in one recent case, give an overwhelmed neurodivergent passenger a quiet place to decompress.

"Obviously, people phone up and request access, but we can't always guarantee it, and nor do we want to," Woodford said. "We don't want it to be an expectation. It's about using it to provide surprise and delight."

As airlines continue launching VIP spaces within their larger lounges to elevate their premium standing, they're also restoring the exclusivity that's been lost in overcrowded areas.

When it comes to Virgin, the Royal Box is likely to become a fixture in its Clubhouses, with Woodford hinting that it could join New York's JFK lounge and beyond.

"It's taken on a whole new lease of life and feels like a signature part of the experience now," she said. "It feels like something that should become an ownable and distinct element of what we offer."

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Hannah Brandler

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Hannah Brandler is an award-winning editor and journalist based in London, specializing in travel, business, and hospitality. Her travels have taken her from Paris to Tokyo, interviewing C-suite figures, securing exclusive stories, and occasionally appearing in travel segments on airport TVs. She is editor at large at Business Traveller, and her work has been published in titles such as Skift, 50 Best Discovery, Elite Traveler, and easyJet Traveller. You can find Hannah at hannahbrandler.com or @hannah.brandler on Instagram. 

• Celebrities

Over the last century, organizations have refined decision making through reporting structures, approval matrices, governance frameworks, regulations, audits and controls. These systems exist to ensure decisions can be explained, challenged and reversed. The architecture of the modern enterprise is therefore a system for managing human judgment.

Today, that assumption is changing. Across financial services organizations, artificial intelligence is moving beyond analysis and recommendation into execution. AI systems are increasingly influencing outcomes, triggering actions, allocating resources and shaping decisions.

This transition is not merely a technology shift. It represents one of the most significant organizational changes since the emergence of the modern corporation itself. For the first time, institutions are preparing to distribute decision-making authority beyond human actors.

The Institution: Designed Around Human Authority

Financial institutions have always operated through structured delegation. A loan officer approves credit because authority is assigned to that role. A procurement manager authorizes expenditure because limits are defined. A compliance officer intervenes because responsibilities and oversight mechanisms are established.

Every meaningful institutional action exists within an architecture of permissions, accountability, escalation paths and controls. This structure has evolved over decades: boards govern executives, executives govern functions, functions govern teams and teams govern processes. At every level, authority is visible, and accountability is clear.

The assumption behind this model is that people make decisions, but that assumption is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Research from Gartner indicates that agentic AI will increasingly participate in enterprise decisions, while IBM research highlights that executive confidence in AI adoption is progressing faster than confidence in governance readiness. Institutions are accelerating decision automation while still defining how authority should be assigned.

The Emergence Of Non-Human Decision Makers

Most AI discussions focus on capability: improving productivity, reducing costs and accelerating execution. However, capability alone does not determine institutional impact; authority does.

An AI agent reviewing supplier onboarding documentation, assessing compliance requirements, evaluating risk exposure or initiating procurement actions is no longer simply a software tool. It is participating in decisions with operational, financial and regulatory consequences.

Organizations have historically governed human judgment. Increasingly, they will need to govern machine judgment. A highly capable employee with unlimited authority would create institutional risk. The same principle applies to AI systems. Their value depends not only on what they can accomplish, but on the boundaries within which they operate.

Why Contracts Are Becoming Strategic Infrastructure

This shift becomes particularly visible through contracts. Historically, contracts were treated as legal records documenting agreements, obligations, approvals and commitments. In the future, I see contracts becoming mechanisms through which authority is defined, governed and enforced.

Every contract establishes permissions, obligations, liabilities, thresholds, exceptions and escalation requirements. These elements form the operating rules intelligent systems must understand before acting autonomously.

Consider a supplier relationship. Before any action occurs, an institution must know who the supplier is, what risks exist, what obligations have been agreed upon, what approvals are required and when decisions can be made. Today, this information often exists across procurement systems, KYC platforms, compliance applications, risk systems and contract repositories. For humans, navigating these fragmented environments is difficult. For autonomous systems, fragmentation becomes a governance challenge.

This is why many AI initiatives struggle beyond pilot stages. Organizations are attempting to automate decisions before creating trusted foundations for authority.

I believe digital agreements should function as active systems of trust rather than passive document repositories. As AI adoption accelerates, institutions will need contract intelligence that can define, monitor and enforce authority boundaries in real time.

The New Competitive Advantage

The race to deploy AI is only one part of the transformation. The more important race is creating institutional trust.

Technology advantages narrow over time. Models improve, capabilities become accessible and competitors catch up. What remains difficult to replicate is an institution’s ability to govern decision making at scale. To succeed, organizations should establish clear frameworks for delegation, accountability, intervention and oversight.

This is especially important in financial services, where trust remains the industry’s most valuable asset. Customers trust institutions with their assets, regulators trust them with systemic stability and markets trust them with capital allocation.

As AI becomes embedded in critical workflows, preserving that trust will depend on how effectively organizations govern authority.

Authority As The Next Leadership Agenda

For decades, governance discussions focused on data, compliance, cybersecurity and operational risk. The next chapter will focus on authority. As a result, leadership teams must answer questions that have never existed at enterprise scale:

• What decisions can AI systems make independently?

• What decisions require human intervention?

• When can authority be expanded or restricted?

• Who remains accountable when machines participate in execution?

These are not technology questions. There are questions about the future design of institutions. Organizations that address them thoughtfully will be better positioned to capture AI’s benefits while maintaining the trust financial services depend upon.

Key Takeaways For Leaders

As AI moves from supporting decisions to participating in them, leaders should:

• Treat AI deployment as an authority challenge, not only a technology initiative.

• Define decision boundaries before granting systems autonomous capabilities.

• Build trusted systems connecting contracts, compliance, risk, onboarding and operations.

• Establish governance frameworks that make machine authority as visible and auditable as human authority.

• Recognize that long-term advantage will come from trusted decision making, not automation alone.

For the first time since the emergence of the modern corporation, leaders are being asked to redesign authority itself. The institutions that succeed will not simply build more intelligent systems. They will build organizations capable of trusting them.​

Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?

This article has been updated to reflect the distinction between misinformation and disinformation.

Another day, another step towards an AI dystopia. Google has just added a "fun" new feature to Google Earth—Nano Banana 2, the company's image creation tool. All you need to do is click on the "create image" button, type in a prompt, and seconds later you'll have a phony picture masquerading as a real satellite and aerial image from Google Earth.

Once upon a time I would have found this ludicrous—that a tool designed to accurately showcase our planet would be touting a feature that lets you make up absolute nonsense. But now we live in a world where the most popular search engine regularly makes up lies.

For a while, Google was convinced I was married, possibly because I, at one point, mentioned my character having a wife in Crusader Kings 3. At least this was largely harmless—but Google's AI summaries regularly hallucinate and misinterprets things, spreading misinformation to the point that it cannot be trusted at all.

Disinformation like manufacturing warzones, riots, crimes—these are less harmless. But Google Earth now lets you create whatever slop you want. This morning, I asked Google Earth to generate an image of tanks and troops moving down a street near my home. I did not save the image, because I have no intention of putting something on the internet that could be used for some nefarious purpose. But feel free to try it for yourself.

I should add that the image Google Earth created for me was not particularly realistic. Some of the tanks, for instance, were as large as buildings. And nobody is going to look at the header image I generated via Google Earth for this article and think "Oh god, an asteroid is hurtling towards us!" AI image creation is inconsistent at best. But Google realises this, which is why it lets you add more prompts to refine the image—to make it as realistic as possible.

Since the feature went live, I've seen plenty of images that, without knowing about Nano Banana 2's integration, look pretty convincing. Digital Digging's Henk van Ess created an image of refugees massing at the Mexican border, which looked troublingly real.

It's easy to see how this tool could be used for propaganda and disinformation, to drum up hate and stoke fears. Google presents the tool as this cute wee thing that will let you add community gardens to abandoned plots or recreate ancient Pompeii, before the eruption of Vesuvius. That's not how it's going to be used.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Google actually responded to the Digital Digging article on X. Here's what it had to say:

This is weak.

OK, yes, Google Earth includes a SynthID digital watermark. So, as per usual, you can use AI tools to identify an AI image. But this is an abdication of responsibility. We're the ones who have to figure out if something is fake or not. Using Google's tools to do it.

As van Hess points out, this is only helpful if the image reaches you unaltered through Google. He ran a clip of him creating the Mexican refugee image through the AI detection tool Hive. It was 99.2% certain the image was real. Because it was real, in the sense that the recording of van Ess creating the image was legit.

So it's pretty easy to bypass detection tools. And yeah, some savvy people will immediately be suspicious unless they can see the original image. Most people don't have time for that. They will have an immediate reaction. And then share it all over social media, where more people will fall for it. By the time it's outed as fake, the damage may have already been done. And the people who fell for it won't be going back to double check.

Image 1 of 2

What about the second part of Google's tweet? "In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections." I turned my hometown into a warzone. That's not a bit of fun. That could be harmful. But Google Earth created this image in seconds. Is pretending that there's a vast gathering of refugees waiting at the Mexican border also just a bit of harmless fun? How about a bombed hospital in Gaza, or a nuclear plant in Iran? All three were created by van Ess.

Sure, people can use all sorts of AI image creation tools to make fakes like this. But people are more likely to give them weight when they clearly come from Google Earth—a tool that we've been trained to trust.

This is one of the most powerful, influential companies on the planet not just peddling lies, but giving the whole planet the tools to create their own fun little bits of disinformation.

The only comfort is that, naturally, Google wants to monetise this. Regular users will only be able to make a couple of images a day, reducing how much chaos they can sow, and potentially stopping them from being able to refine images to make them as realistic as possible. So casual trolls will be pretty limited in what they can do. But there is a free trial for new Google Cloud users, and the $75-$150 per month cost won't matter to the more dedicated propagandists.

This sucks, and I am so, so tired.

Fraser is the UK online editor and has actually met The Internet in person. With over a decade of experience, he's been around the block a few times, serving as a freelancer, news editor and prolific reviewer. Strategy games have been a 30-year-long obsession, from tiny RTSs to sprawling political sims, and he never turns down the chance to rave about Total War or Crusader Kings. He's also been known to set up shop in the latest MMO and likes to wind down with an endlessly deep, systemic RPG. These days, when he's not editing, he can usually be found writing features that are 1,000 words too long or talking about his dog. %!s()

Is she right? And what's she even talking about?

As a paleomagnetist—someone who studies Earth's magnetic field and reads ancient rocks to understand how it was in the past—let me walk you through what it means for Earth's poles to flip, what groundwater has to do with it, and why there is absolutely nothing to worry about.

Which pole, exactly?

The first problem is that there are two very different "north poles."

The geographic North Pole is the one on every map, and it is the spot where Earth's spin axis meets the surface. This pole drifts by about 10 cm (4 inches) a year, as ice, water and movements of Earth's crust shift mass around the planet.

The magnetic north pole is something else entirely: the spot where the magnetic field points straight down. It slowly wanders around the geographic pole, a restlessness we call secular variation.

The unflippable geographic pole

Can the geographic pole flip? In practice, no.

A spinning Earth behaves like a gyroscope—a spinning top that resists being tipped over. Its axis stays remarkably steady, drifting only very slowly. A sudden flip, with the spin axis tipping right over, is essentially impossible and unknown in Earth's history.

Scientists once thought evidence of glaciers near the equator, between around 700 million and 635 million years ago, may have been evidence of an ancient drastic move or flip in the geographic pole.

But that explanation has largely fallen away. Most researchers now believe the glaciers occurred during a "Snowball Earth" period, when the world was frozen almost all the way to the tropics.

As for pumping groundwater, it can affect the geographic pole—but only very slightly. From 1993 to 2010, all the groundwater pumped worldwide shifted this pole by about 4 cm (1.6 inches) a year.

The magnetic pole is a different story

Earth's magnetic field, by contrast, really does flip. It has happened often in the past, but at irregular and unpredictable intervals.

The last complete reversal was about 780,000 years ago. The most recent big disturbance was the Laschamp excursion roughly 41,000 years ago, when the field's strength collapsed almost to zero and the magnetic pole swung down toward the equator before recovering.

Even then, a reversal is no overnight switch: High-resolution sediment records—including from Armenian lake beds—show the field weakening and swinging over thousands of years, with a global average of around 7,000 years. Looking at this restless history, it's fair to say another reversal is likely at some point in the geological future.

Could it be soon? Some scientists note the field's strength has been falling steadily and argue a reversal could be only one or two thousand years away. There is currently a weak patch over the South Atlantic known as the South Atlantic Anomaly, which is seen as a possible starting point.

Earth's magnetic field is generated by swirling liquid iron in the outer core. This system is so complex that no one can truly predict it, and its strength could just as easily start climbing again. And when researchers compared the South Atlantic Anomaly with the Laschamp excursion, they concluded we are probably not on the verge of a reversal at all.

Made deep inside Earth

Crucially, magnetic pole reversals are born in the liquid outer core, between 2,890 km (1,800 miles) and 5,150 km (3,200 miles) beneath our feet. We still don't know exactly why they happen, but we do know that structures deep in the overlying mantle shape how the field behaves during reversals.

These structures affect how often reversals happen and what they look like. The South Atlantic Anomaly itself sits above one such deep structure.

Even the most violent surface events don't seem to reach that far down. The giant asteroid impact linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs, for example, is not thought to have triggered a reversal.

True polar wander

There is one more kind of pole movement: true polar wander. Here, the spin axis stays fixed in space while the whole solid Earth slowly rotates relative to it.

This means the poles shift relative to the continents—a gradual drift of up to a few degrees per million years, driven by enormous masses shifting inside the mantle.

In the Precambrian Era, billions of years ago, polar wander probably helped drag Earth's first supercontinents toward the equator, since a spinning planet is most stable when its biggest masses sit there.

So where does this leave us with groundwater and flipping poles? Earth really is a deeply interconnected system, and moving water around does shift the poles measurably, by centimeters a year.

But a flip of the geographic pole is impossible, and magnetic reversals are almost certainly disconnected from anything we do at the surface. We can nudge the climate, but there is no reason to think we could reach down and flip the switch in Earth's core.

Who's behind this story?

Sadie Harley

BSc Life Sciences & Ecology. Microbiology lab background with pharmaceutical news experience in oil, gas, and renewable industries. Full profile →

Andrew Zinin

Master's in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X's editorial success. Full profile →

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Citation: Can pumping groundwater really flip Earth's poles? An expert explains (2026, July 31) retrieved 31 July 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-07-groundwater-flip-earth-poles-expert.html

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