It sure seemed like I was getting "rich" after a modest number of caravan games, so I checked my caps immediately before starting a hand. I had 7,272, and the AI placed a bet of 420 caps which I auto-matched. After winning the hand, I had a little over 8,000 caps, rather than the 7,692 that I should have had. This seems to indicate that it's adding the entire ante pool to my pre-existing number of caps, when it should only be adding the AI's bet amount.

Is anyone else experiencing this as well, and if so - am I missing something about how the bets should work?

PS
I'm on PC.

I've noticed this too. I assume it's a bug because it doesn't make any sense to add the money you just put down on top of the money you already have. I don't question it too much though since it makes keeping my caps up so easy. "So I just bought like 1k worth of weapon mods, ammo, and armor from you...wanna play some Caravan?"

I do that all the time. Spend all my money buying guns, mods, anything and play caravan to win it all back So good.

Apparently this is still bugged (at least on PC).

If you and the AI each bet 500 caps, and you win - you should be 500 caps richer than you were before opening the conversation with that NPC. Instead, you'll get 1,000 caps since it's treating your bet as though it materialized out of thin air, and is adding it to the winnings you receive from the AI player. This is an exploit that makes it incredibly easy to get rich, even in the very early portion of the game.