Mark Cuban Says Trade Secrets Are Going To Become More Common In The AI Age: Here's What The Billionaire Said

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban says companies will increasingly skip patents and lean on trade secrets as artificial intelligence reshapes the basic economics of intellectual property.

Musk's Open-Source Patents Spark Cuban's Warning

In an X post on Monday, Cuban shared a clip of Elon Musk's 2023 New York Times DealBook Summit interview, in which Musk said none of his companies have tried to stifle rivals and noted that Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) open-sourced its patents while SpaceX largely avoids using them.

Cuban argued that AI flips the patent bargain on its head. "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," he wrote. "Then everyone on the planet can ask for a work around to file a competitive patent.

"Your IP is no longer yours the minute you publish it," he added.

‘Publish Or Perish' Now Trains Rival Models

Cuban has been warning founders for months that posting proprietary work online, including through patents and academic papers, now doubles as free training data for competitors' AI models. As per a Business Insider report, in a recent call with Clipbook founder Adam Joseph, whose startup received a seven-figure investment from Cuban, he called the traditional "publish or perish" mindset "the biggest mistake you can make" because it "trains somebody else's models."

He also told Joseph that in an AI-driven economy, "data or information is more valuable than gold, more valuable than oil." He urged companies to protect key datasets and build their own models rather than hand material to third-party tools.

Long-Running Fight Against Patent Protections

His skepticism of the patent system long predates the current AI boom. Cuban funded the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents" in 2012 and has urged Washington to scrap software patents outright, saying they "crush small businesses."

He recently blasted a Commerce Department idea to charge new fees based on a patent's value, warning it would push inventors away from filing just as they are trying to shield their work from large language models.

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