Read-Only by Default

sportsclaw can read live odds and prediction-market prices from Kalshi and Polymarket — but it is built to track, not trade. Placing bets, moving funds, or signing transactions is off by default.

What's blocked

The engine refuses any action that would place or cancel an order, buy or sell, or touch a wallet or balance. This is enforced everywhere the agent runs — when tools are first offered to the model and again before any tool actually executes. A prompt that asks the bot to "buy 100 shares" gets a refusal, not an order.

Bots and servers are always read-only

Any deployment that other people talk to — your Discord bot, your Telegram bot, a hosted service — is hard read-only. There is no configuration in those surfaces that turns trading on. Your community can ask for odds, edges, and analysis; they cannot make your bot place a wager.

The local owner can opt in

When you run sportsclaw yourself from your own terminal, you're the trusted owner. In that local session you can opt into trading-capable tools — but only if an underlying skill actually exposes them, and only for you. This never extends to a deployed bot.

Approvals for everything else

Beyond markets, the engine gates other side effects — writing files, running shell commands — behind explicit approval, so an autonomous run can't quietly do something you didn't sanction. You approve an action once, or pre-approve it for the session.

The short version

Read odds and markets freely. Trading is blocked for every bot and server deployment. Only you, locally, can opt into trade-capable tools.