Billionaire investor Mark Cuban issued a warning on July 21, 2025, stating that the race for dominance in artificial intelligence has definitively shifted from mere technology creation to a fierce battle for two key resources: exclusive talent and protectable intellectual property (IP). His opinion, covered in leading business publications like Business Insider and Barrons, is a reaction to recent industry events, including the "talent war" between Meta and OpenAI. Cuban emphasized that there are only a few hundred people in the world capable of creating and training next-generation foundational AI models. According to him, these specialists, not the companies themselves, are the most valuable and scarce asset. He noted that tech giants are willing to pay "any price" for such researchers, offering compensation packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars not only to strengthen themselves but also to weaken competitors. The second front in this battle, according to Cuban, is intellectual property. This includes not only patents on algorithms but, more importantly, ownership of unique training datasets and the trained models themselves. He predicts that in the near future, we will see an increase in lawsuits and M&A deals aimed at consolidating control over key IP assets in the AI space. Cubans statement is an important signal to startups and investors: long-term success in AI will depend not on big announcements, but on the ability to attract and retain elite specialists and to create unique, protected intellectual property.
Mark Cuban: The AI Race is a Battle for Talent and Intellectual Property
