Mark Cuban warns: “Only one of you will win” the AI race

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In a blunt warning to the tech industry’s biggest players, billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban said that OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and others are “overspending” on AI with the false belief that they’ll all emerge victorious. “Only one of you will win,” he cautioned, implying that the current surge of investment and competition in AI is unsustainable.

Cuban’s comments were made in a direct message sent to AI search startup Perplexity, a company he’s backed financially. He posted the message on X, criticizing Big Tech’s aggressive spend on AI infrastructure and talent — comparing the situation to a dotcom-era land grab. “You are all spending like you are going to win. You are not. Only one of you will win,” Cuban wrote.

His remarks follow reports of Google investing billions into scaling its Gemini AI model, Microsoft doubling down on OpenAI partnerships, and Anthropic raising substantial rounds to expand Claude’s capabilities. Cuban’s main concern: the race is not about technology anymore, but about who can sustain the highest cost of experimentation and compute. “All of you are doing the exact same thing,” he said.

Cuban’s perspective reinforces growing skepticism about the long-term economics of generative AI. Despite wide adoption and mainstream curiosity, many AI companies — especially startups — are still figuring out sustainable business models. With compute-intensive architectures, rising cloud costs, and user churn, profitability remains elusive.

While Perplexity continues to rise in popularity as a real-time AI search engine, Cuban believes its leaner approach could offer a counterpoint to the AI giants. His final note? “Outspending each other isn’t strategy. It’s desperation.”