Billionaire investor Mark Cuban believes artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how companies protect their intellectual property. In a post shared on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) Cuban argued that firms will increasingly skip patents and rely on trade secrets instead. “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 work around to file a competitive patent,” he wrote. He added: “Your IP is no longer yours the minute you publish it.”

Publish or perish now trains rivals models

Cuban has been warning founders that publishing proprietary work whether through patents or academic papers now doubles as free training data for competitors’ AI models. In a recent call with Clipbook founder Adam Joseph, whose startup Cuban invested in, said that the traditional ‘publish or perish’ mindset is ‘the biggest mistake you can make’ because it ‘trains somebody else’s models’.He further emphasised that in an AI-driven economy, data holds more value as compared to gold or oil. He urged the companies to protect key datasets and create their own models rather than handover material to other third-party tools.

Mark Cuban explains his point by giving example of Elon Musk

The comments made by Cuban were prompted by a clip of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Cuban shared a clip of Musk from 2023 DealBook Summit interview where Musk mentioned that Tesla open-sourced its patents and SpaceX largely avoid them. Cuban suggested that the approach of Elon Musk may soon become a norm in the AI age, as companies look to protect innovations through secrecy rather than public filings.Cuban’s skepticism of the patent system predates the AI boom. In 2012, he funded the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents” and has long called for Washington to scrap software patents outright, arguing they stifle small businesses.More recently, he criticised a Commerce Department proposal to charge new fees based on a patent’s value, warning it would discourage inventors from filing patents just as they are trying to shield their work from large language models.