Mark Cuban, entrepreneur and former ‘Shark Tank’ star, is questioning whether patents still offer any real protection in today’s environment.
In a recent post on X, he said filing a patent might actually create more problems than it solves.
“Not filing patents and using trade secrets will become more common,” Cuban wrote.
“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 argues that publishing a patent is no longer a safeguard; it’s practically an invitation for others to copy or tweak your invention.
With the help of advanced AI tools, he says, anyone can rework a patented idea just enough to get around it and file their own version.
That flips the way many business owners think about patents. Instead of giving inventors a competitive edge, they could now be used against them.
Elon Musk: We Don’t Use Patents Either
To back up his point, Cuban shared a video of Elon Musk explaining how his companies approach intellectual property.
“Nothing any of my companies have done has been to stifle competition. In fact, we’ve done the opposite,” Musk said.
“So, at Tesla, we have open-sourced our patents. Anyone can use our patents for free.”
Musk said SpaceX takes an even more guarded approach.
“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,” he said.
“But we’ve done nothing anti-competitive. We’ve done nothing to stop our competitors.”
He added that both Tesla and SpaceX have made moves to help other companies, not block them.
“At Tesla, we have made our supercharger system open access. It’s got the new cable. It’s even got the new screen here. So, non-Teslas are going to be able to charge here. We’ve made our charger technology available for free to the other manufacturers.”
Keeping Ideas Quiet Might Be the Smarter Move
Cuban and Musk both point to a growing shift in how tech companies think about protecting their innovations.
With the rise of powerful AI models that can rapidly digest and remix information, some believe that keeping ideas in-house, through trade secrets, might now be a safer bet than filing public patents.
That could be a major change in strategy, especially for startups and inventors used to viewing patents as a badge of legitimacy or a layer of legal defense.
This Isn’t Just Theory, It’s Already Happening
Cuban’s post got traction because it touches on a real-world issue: legal systems haven’t kept pace with the speed and scale of AI.
What used to be a strong legal wall might now be more like a blueprint handout.
A new playbook may be emerging, where keeping critical ideas private offers stronger protection than filing official paperwork. Others seem to agree.
One person wrote, “I spent a decade inside an S&P500 company and can tell you for a fact it’s been this way since at least the mid 2010’s.”
Another pointed out that trade secrets only work if you can truly protect them:
“The patent system wasn’t built for the AI era. Trade secrets only work if you can actually keep them secret—which gets harder when your entire team needs to understand the implementation.”
Another person noted, “It’s been like this for a while, now it’s just accelerating…In the end, stuff will leak anyway, whether they file patents or not, so can’t really put too much weight on keeping things secret.”
The bottom line? Companies may need to think less about locking up their ideas through the legal system, and more about what’s actually defensible in practice.
IMAGE CREDIT: “Mark Cuban” by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Image adjusted for layout.