On January 9, 2021, DraftKings opened the first regulated US betting market on drone racing, a Drone Racing League final flown in a simulator and bet on from phones in five states. Five years on, the most interesting machine race of the year so far was not a betting event at all. In Abu Dhabi, South Korean pilot Minchan “MCK FPV” Kim beat an autonomous drone from TII Racing 5–4 when the AI clipped a gate on the deciding run.
That gap between what machines can do and what you can actually bet on is why Drone.bet exists. We cover drone racing betting, betting on AI and the wider business of wagering on the future. We tell you plainly when a market is live, when it is dormant and when it never existed.
Drone racing betting without the hype
Drone racing has a real betting history. Pinnacle is believed to have taken the first wagers in 2016, and Betfair priced every heat of the DRL’s 2017 season finale at Alexandra Palace in London. DraftKings followed in 2021 with pre-race and in-race bets on the DRL in Colorado, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Tennessee and West Virginia.
The flip side is that the Drone Racing League has not announced a new season since its U.S. Air Force Miami Invitational on February 1, 2025. Our US drone betting guide and UK drone racing betting page track where markets actually appear, and our DRL pilot profiles keep the form book honest.
Meanwhile the sport kept flying elsewhere. The Drone Champions League ran its Falcon, Eagle and Hawk Cups through 2026, and MultiGP crowned MCK FPV its champion in Carrollton, Texas, in October.
Betting on AI and the machines that race
The newest machine sports are autonomous. A2RL put AI-flown drones against each other in Abu Dhabi for a $600,000 prize pool, with TII Racing setting a 12.032-second lap. University teams race driverless cars at Laguna Seca in the Indy Autonomous Challenge. At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August 2026, a robot from the Tianjiao team ran 100m in 8.64 seconds. BattleBots now fields Orbitron, billed as the first AI-controlled fighting robot.
Sportsbooks rarely price any of it. Prediction markets do something adjacent. They let you trade on the outcome of the AI race itself, such as which lab will top the public leaderboards at year end. Our AI prediction markets guide explains how those contracts resolve, and the live widget below tracks the headline market.
The AI race · marketMarket price
Which company has the best AI model at the end of 2026?
Prices from Polymarket, October 23, 2026 07:17. Not a recommendation. See market
Where the money markets are today
Betting on the future also means betting on new kinds of products. Three of them now carry most of the action outside traditional sportsbooks.
Prediction markets
Kalshi, Polymarket, DraftKings Predictions, FanDuel Predicts and others sell event contracts regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Several states dispute their right to offer sports contracts, and that litigation is still moving through the courts. Start with our prediction markets hub and the state-by-state legal tracker.
Sweepstakes casinos
Sweepstakes sites use two virtual currencies and a no-purchase-necessary entry route. A growing list of states, including New Jersey, New York and California, has banned them. Our sweepstakes casino guide lists who still operates where.
State sportsbooks and online casinos
Ten state hubs, from New Jersey to North Carolina, cover licensed apps, regulators and local quirks such as Ohio’s ban on college player props. Start at our US betting by state page.
We test the software people use to find value: model-driven pick services, odds screens and soccer prediction sites. We also build our own free calculators for odds conversion, parlays, implied probability, hedging, arbitrage and the Kelly criterion. They live in our betting tools section, with each-way and Lucky 15 calculators in the UK section.
A separate UK edition
UK readers get their own section at drone.bet/uk, written in British English and limited to bookmakers licensed by the Gambling Commission. It covers betting sites, online casinos, free bets and horse racing, with every offer showing its significant terms.
How we work
Drone.bet is published by Gambler Labs ApS. Some operators pay us when readers sign up, and those links are labeled. Payment never buys a ranking or a fake odds table. We don’t publish odds we didn’t see, results we can’t source or bonuses we can’t find on an operator’s own terms page.
21+ for US real-money gambling and most prediction markets (18+ on some platforms). Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. UK: 18+, GambleAware.org.
