Billionaire investor Mark Cuban believes that filing patents will no longer protect businesses as they once did amid the proliferation of AI.
In a new post on X, Cuban warns that AI is quietly turning patents from a competitive moat into a strategic liability, especially as large language models rapidly absorb public technical disclosures.
According to Cuban, AI can quickly crawl web pages and soak in the new knowledge from a patent filing.
“Not filing patents and using trade secrets will become more common. Why? Because the second you file your patent, every LLM is going to be able to train on it. Then everyone on the planet can ask for a workaround to file a competitive patent. Your IP is no longer yours the minute you publish it.”
Cuban’s comments come as he reacts to Elon Musk’s statements during a New York Times DealBook Summit. According to Musk, SpaceX, Tesla and all of his other companies are not in the habit of filing patents.
“Nothing any of my companies have done has been to stifle competition. In fact, we’ve done the opposite.
At Tesla, we have open-sourced our patents. Anyone can use our patents for free.
At SpaceX, we don’t use patents. Once in a while, we’ll file a patent just so some patent troll doesn’t cause trouble. But we’ve done nothing anticompetitive.”
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