DraftKings tells Congress its AI never targeted problem gamblers

Senator Richard Blumenthal's letter arrived at DraftKings on October 22, 2026, co-signed by Representatives Paul Tonko and Valerie Foushee. The question it asked was not subtle: how does the company use technology to interact with customers, and specifically what governs access to its VIP and rewards programs.

DraftKings' response was categorical. It has never directed promotional offers at customers showing signs of problem gambling. People on its self-exclusion list and those removed by the company's own behavioral monitoring receive no promotional materials. The VIP tier, which covers roughly one percent of its customer base, remains subject to ongoing monitoring after enrollment, administered through what the company calls its Responsible Engagement Team.

The Congressional inquiry followed a New York Times investigation into whether sportsbooks use consumer data to identify customers with high "elasticity" — the industry term for willingness to keep spending after losses — and then promote to them accordingly. FanDuel faces the same questions. Both companies have acknowledged they track loss data by account. Neither has denied knowing which customers lost money or how much. The distinction they are drawing is narrower: that knowledge, they argue, did not translate into targeting.

That is the distinction Congress is now stress-testing, and it is a harder one to hold than it sounds. Knowing which customers have high elasticity and choosing not to act on it is a compliance posture that depends entirely on internal governance — policies, audit trails, the actual behavior of a Responsible Engagement Team under commercial pressure. A letter to Congress asserts the posture exists. It does not demonstrate that the governance held at the transaction level, in every market, across every promotional campaign.

I have read enough responses to Congressional inquiries to know that categorical denials accompanied by program descriptions are not the same as demonstrated compliance. They are the opening position in a longer process. What follows is document production, and document production tends to narrow the distance between what a company says it does and what the record shows it did.

The state regulators who began their own reviews after the Times piece are not bound by the Congressional timeline. They have licensing authority DraftKings cannot afford to lose, and several of them have subpoena power that does not require a formal response letter to exercise.

The legal exposure here does not sit in federal consumer protection law, where the jurisdictional question is genuinely complicated. It sits in the conditions attached to DraftKings' state licenses — conditions that in several jurisdictions explicitly prohibit marketing to customers identified as at-risk. Whether the company's internal definitions of "at-risk" match the definitions written into those license conditions is the question no Congressional letter resolves.