FAA outage attributed to AI?

This Polymarket contract asks whether the U.S. government will officially attribute the November 13, 2026 FAA outage to artificial intelligence between market creation and November 30, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. ET. It resolves Yes only if a statement meets the market’s attribution requirements within that window; otherwise, it resolves No.

The event and the attribution test

The rules identify the relevant incident as the equipment and communications outage associated with the FAA’s nationwide ground stop on U.S. airport departures on November 13. The contract concerns an official attribution of that specific incident, rather than a general assessment of AI risks in aviation.

A qualifying statement must come from an authorized representative of the U.S. federal government acting in an official capacity. It must state that an AI system, model or agent itself caused the outage. The definition includes malfunction, error or autonomous action, whether involving AI used by the FAA or its contractors, or a model or agent acting outside its developers’ or operators’ control.

What does not count

Statements that AI is a suspected, likely or probable cause, or that its involvement has not been ruled out, do not qualify. A statement identifying AI only as a contributing factor also falls short of the stated test.

The rules distinguish an AI system causing the outage from people carrying out a cyberattack using AI tools. Human use of such tools does not qualify unless the required statement attributes the outage to the AI system, model or agent itself.

Anonymous or unnamed officials, foreign governments and private companies cannot provide a qualifying attribution on their own. Readers should therefore examine who is speaking, in what capacity, and the precise causal claim being made before treating a report as evidence of a Yes result.

The deadline and retraction provision

The attribution window ends November 30, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. ET. An unresolved investigation or discussion of possible causes does not extend that deadline. A No result under these rules would mean that no qualifying attribution occurred within the window; it would not necessarily settle every technical question about the incident.

Once a qualifying attribution is made, the contract resolves Yes regardless of a later retraction or the eventual outcome of an investigation. A completed investigation is therefore not a separate prerequisite for Yes. The decisive event is the qualifying public statement within the specified period.

How to assess new information

The primary resolution sources are official U.S. government statements and publications, while a consensus of credible reporting may also be used. Reporting can document what an authorized representative said, but the underlying attribution still needs to satisfy the contract’s rules.

Market prices reflect expectations about that defined event, rather than proof of AI causation. A change in odds, a technology rollout or speculation about a software component does not itself establish the result. The useful questions are whether an authorized federal representative made an explicit attribution, whether AI itself was identified as the cause, and whether the statement fell within the resolution window.

Source: Polymarket contract and complete resolution rules.