A U.S. special forces soldier involved in the military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been charged with using classified information about the mission to win more than $400,000 in an online betting market, federal officials announced Thursday.

Gannon Ken Van Dyke was part of the operation to capture Maduro in January and used his access to classified information to make money on the prediction market site Polymarket, the federal prosecutor's office in New York said.

He has been charged by the Justice Department with unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud and making an unlawful monetary transaction. He could face years in prison.

Van Dyke, 38, was involved in the planning and execution of capturing Maduro for about a month beginning Dec. 8, 2025, according to the federal prosecutor's office. Even though he signed nondisclosure agreements promising to not divulge "any classified or sensitive information" related to the operations, prosecutors say the Army soldier used this information to make a series of bets related to Maduro being out of power by Jan. 31, 2026.

"This involved a U.S. soldier who allegedly took advantage of his position to profit off of a righteous military operation," FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post to social media.

A telephone number listed for Van Dyke in public records was not in service. There was not yet an attorney listed for him in court documents.

Polymarket, one of the largest prediction markets in the world, said it had found someone trading on classified government information, alerted the U.S. Department of Justice and "cooperated with their investigation."

"Insider trading has no place on Polymarket," the company said in a statement.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates prediction markets, announced Thursday it had filed a parallel complaint against Van Dyke.

That complaint alleges that Van Dyke moved $35,000 from his personal bank account into a cryptocurrency exchange account on Dec. 26 — a little over a week before U.S. forces would fly into Caracas and seize Maduro.

Van Dyke used more than $32,500 to make a series of bets on when Maduro might be removed from power, according to the complaint. He placed those bets between Dec. 30 and Jan. 2, with the vast majority occurring the night of Jan. 2 — just hours before the first missiles would fall on Caracas.

In the early hours of Jan. 3, President Donald Trump posted on his social media platform a photo of the now-captured Venezuelan leader, wearing a gray sweatsuit, headphones and a blindfold.

The bets Van Dyke made on Maduro leaving power resulted in "more than $404,000 of profits," the complaint said. Bets on three other Venezuela-related contracts netted the solider more than $5,000, according to the document.

"The defendant was entrusted with confidential information about U.S. operations and yet took action that endangered U.S. national security and put the lives of American service members in harm's way," said Michael Selig, the commission's chairman.

The massive profits from the well-timed bets aroused public attention days after the raid and brought bipartisan calls for stricter regulation of the markets where people can wager on just about anything.

Officials allege that shortly after the operation, Van Dyke put most of the money he won in a foreign cryptocurrency vault and then into a new brokerage account. He also asked Polymarket to delete his account, saying he had lost access to his email associated with the account, according to the federal prosecutor's office.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday refused to block the Pentagon from blacklisting artificial intelligence laboratory Anthropic in a decision that differed from the conclusions reached in another judge's ruling on the same issues.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., rejected Anthropic's request for an order that would shield the San Francisco company from the fallout stemming from a dispute over how the Pentagon could deploy its Claude chatbot in fully autonomous weapons and potential surveillance of Americans while the panel is still collecting evidence about the case.

But the setback in Washington came after Anthropic already had prevailed in separate case focused on the same issues in San Francisco federal court. In that case, a judge forced President Donald Trump's administration to remove a label tainting the company as a national security risk.

Anthropic filed the two separate lawsuits in San Francisco and the Washington appeals court last month, asserting the Trump administration was engaging in an "unlawful campaign of retaliation" because of its attempt to impose limits on how its AI technology can be deployed. The Trump administration blasted Anthropic as a liberal-leaning company trying to dictate U.S. military policy.

In the San Francisco case, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Trump administration had overstepped its bounds by labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk unqualified to work with military contractors and issuing other directives that could cripple a company locked in a race for AI supremacy against rivals such as ChatGPT maker Open AI and Google.

That decision prompted the Trump administration to remove the stigmatizing labels from Anthropic and take other steps clearing the way for government employees and contractors to continue using Claude and other chatbots, according to court filing made in San Francisco earlier this week.

The Supreme Court is taking up one of the term's most consequential cases, President Donald Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens, and he was in the courtroom on Wednesday to attend the arguments.

The justices will hear Trump's appeal of a lower-court ruling from New Hampshire that struck down the citizenship restrictions, one of several courts that have blocked them. They have not taken effect anywhere in the country.

Trump is the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the nation's highest court. Crowds watched from the sidewalks as his motorcade drove along Constitution and Independence Avenues, passing the Washington Monument and the National Mall on the way to the court building.

The case frames another test of Trump's assertions of executive power that defy long-standing precedent for a court that has largely ruled in the president's favor — but with some notable exceptions that Trump has responded to with starkly personal criticisms of the justices. A definitive ruling is expected by early summer.

The birthright citizenship order, which Trump signed the first day of his second term, is part of his Republican administration's broad immigration crackdown.

Birthright citizenship is the first Trump immigration-related policy to reach the court for a final ruling. The justices previously struck down global tariffs Trump had imposed under an emergency powers law that had never been used that way.

Trump reacted furiously to the late February tariffs decision, saying he was ashamed of the justices who ruled against him and calling them unpatriotic.

He issued a preemptive broadside against the court on Sunday on his Truth Social platform. "Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America. It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES!," the president wrote. "Dumb Judges and Justices will not a great Country make!"

Trump's order would upend the long-standing view that the Constitution's 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, and federal law since 1940 confer citizenship on everyone born on American soil, with narrow exceptions for the children of foreign diplomats and those born to a foreign occupying force.

A jury convicted a Wisconsin man of election fraud and identity theft for requesting the ballots of Republican state Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Democratic Racine Mayor Cory Mason without their consent.

Jurors in Racine County on Tuesday found Harry Wait guilty of two misdemeanor election fraud charges and one felony identity theft charge following a two-day trial. He was acquitted of a second count of identity theft.

Wait leads a group that makes false election claims, including that Wisconsin's elections are riddled with fraud and that President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Trump lost Wisconsin in 2020 by about 21,000 votes.

Wait admitted in 2022 that he requested Vos' and Mason's ballots to try to prove that the state's voter registration system is vulnerable to fraud. Wait told The Associated Press at the time that he wasn't surprised he was charged.

"You got to expect to pay some costs sometimes when you are trying to work for the public good," he said.

His efforts drew praise from Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson in 2022, who called Wait a "white hat hacker."

After the verdict, Wait told WTMJ that he "would do it again." "I tested the system and the system failed," he said.

A sentencing date has not been set. Wait's attorney Joe Bugni did not respond to an email Wednesday asking whether he would appeal.

Wait, 71, faces up to six years in prison on the felony conviction and up to a year in jail on each of the misdemeanor convictions.

His conviction comes after a jury in 2024 found a former Milwaukee election official guilty of misconduct in office after she obtained three military absentee ballots using fake names and Social Security numbers in 2022. Like Wait, Kimberly Zapata argued that she was trying to expose vulnerabilities in the state's election system.

Zapata was fined $3,000 and sentenced to one year probation.