By Caroline Humer
NASHVILLE, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban said on Friday that he is "not a doomer" about artificial intelligence and that companies should be able to use the technology to protect themselves from AI-driven hacks by agents that he compared to cockroaches.
"It's like the cockroach thing, right? You build a new house, you get the guys to come out and spray... the one thing I don't want is cockroaches in my house ever. But the cockroaches find a way to get in because
there's zillions of them, right? And then if there's one gets in, there's more that are going to get in, and that's kind of the way AI works," Cuban said, speaking at Reuters Total Health.
"It's all brute force acts, and if it's brute force on that side with the bad guys, you can also use brute force with the good guys," he said.
Cuban, famous for his role on business reality show "Shark Tank" and his involvement in the Dallas Mavericks NBA team, ventured into healthcare when he started the online pharmacy Cost Plus Drug Company in 2022 with a standard pricing scheme: the cost it pays for the drug, plus 15%.
In May, Cost Plus signed on with TrumpRx.gov, a website created by the Trump administration selling discounted weight-loss drugs.
But the company has also moved into manufacturing. In 2025, it began making sterile injectable drugs typically used in hospitals in its own compounding manufacturing facility.
Cuban said the company has built smaller, tractor-trailer-sized manufacturing facilities he calls "pods" that can be used separately or together to manufacture many kinds of drugs, including generics and treatments for rare diseases.
He said the pods would eventually be Cost Plus Drugs' biggest business and would allow medicines to be manufactured closer to where they are needed in the event of a disaster, because they're portable.
One holdup, Cuban said, has been getting regulators from the US Food and Drug Administration to sign off on the pods."We're talking to the FDA to try to get approval," he said without outlining the complications. "They're working hard to try to figure it out."
Cuban campaigned for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024 and has supported Democratic candidate James Talarico for US Senate this year in Texas.
He said two items he believes the US government should immediately put in place to help lower healthcare costs would be that all payments made out of pocket should count towards patients' deductibles and that taxpayer-funded health contracts should be public without redactions.
Still, Cuban said he did not believe Democrats were necessarily better than Republicans on healthcare.
"None of them know what they're doing," he said.
(Reporting by Caroline Humer in Nashville, Writing by Michael Erman in New Jersey; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
