Protect Your Business Now Before Someone Uses AI To Steal It

Nice business you have here, friend. It’d be a real shame if AI copied it and stole it

I’ve got a fun little story about the five minutes at the end of an otherwise uneventful meeting.

I said, “I’ve got one more question and it’s probably a stupid one.”

It wasn’t.

“Did you guys know about [company X] and [company Y] who are using your name with a ‘zany’ top level domain extension?’

Pause for a second so that my meeting counterparts can surf the web.

“[swear word],” said the CEO I was meeting with.

In the span of three weeks, not one, but two usurpers had risen up to besmirch the excellent and clever name that the stealth startup I’m advising had secured two years ago.

Now, I know what your first question is going to be. Do they have a patent or at least a trademark?

I’m here to tell you that the answer doesn’t matter anymore. To them or to you or to anyone else.

We’re in the AI IP Wild West on brand, ideas, apps, even entire businesses. And no one is talking about it. There’s simply nothing stopping someone using AI to steal your business. But I have a simple three-point protection plan.

Blindingly Fast and Shockingly Stupid

IP theft happens in the blink of an eye, for reasons that even guys like me who have seen everything are shocked at how stupid they are. What IP theft does guarantee, regardless of how useless the theft is at face value, is a huge headache or worse for the victim of said theft.

Do you have any idea how much a “cease and desist” letter costs in 2026?

Actually the letter doesn’t cost anything. It’s the letterhead you’re paying for.

But my point is, by the time we’re registering for that trademark or submitting those patent applications, it’s already too late. To put it simply: Good luck suing that bot.

And as for the “fast” part of what will make you furious, imagine a technology so advanced that it’s already pre-emptively stealing your ideas before you even have them. I’m kind of being facetious, but that’s pretty much what AI is doing right now, and I’ll prove it.

Here’s what happened to the guys I advise.

AI Already Did It, But Worse

My guys got off easy here.

The stealth startup I advise is being spun out of a successful source company, with my help on the product and AI side. I got involved about a year ago, which was at least a year after they had started working on it. Everything is lining up for their launch not long from now.

They were totally caught off-guard when I mentioned that two other entities were operating using their chosen name, which was not even public knowledge yet. Each of the online entities ended in dot something stupid, let’s call it dot fart and dot hardtospellthing.

But while the startup I advise got caught off-guard, they didn’t get caught flat-footed.

The COO: “We chose the name because it was on point but obscure enough that no one had it or would likely think of it. We did a URL and trademark search and it never came up. We checked again like three weeks ago. These companies weren’t there.”

But the problem isn’t the fact that it happened, it was why it happened.

These Are Likely AI Shell Companies

Like I said, the good news is there was little impact to this stealth startup. The bad news is what it implies for everyone with a real business that they’ve invested years and many dollars into building, including investment in intellectual property and execution of brilliant ideas.

AI is going to steal all that hard work — maybe even by accident.

The first copy site (dot fart) was for an AI-based job search… thing. There’s no up-front mention of how much it cost. In fact, there are no identifying names on the website, no location or even region or country information, no about page, no track record, customer quotes. Nothing.

The second site (dot hardtospellthing) had even less information. I literally have no idea what its purpose is.

And that’s when it hit me. These might not be scams or hacker honey pots or blatant copies at all. They’re probably just a couple of AI projects in development. Just someone messing around with AI coding and maybe even legitimately trying to start their own business.

The clever name these companies usurped wasn’t even descriptive of my best guess at what either of these companies were trying to do. So the similarity seemed to be completely incidental, even accidental. I feel pretty confident about that.

And in that sense, it’s harmless.

But what if it wasn’t?

It’s Not Just About “Building the Next Kalshi”

The thing about AI — with all its free knowledge and processing power and code bots and agent assassins — is that it holds the promise that anyone with a chatbot is able to build “the next Kalshi” or the next Instagram or the next Salesforce.

Flawed promise, for sure. But… the AI-slingers don’t even have to aim that high.

They could just build the next whatever it is you’re building, as long as it looks and smells successful and generates revenue.

They might not even mean to steal your ideas. In fact, the AI-slingers might not even know you exist. They just woke up one day and decided to do something that happens to resemble what you’re doing, but worse and without a lot of thought behind it. Slap a URL on it with dot fart, and come after your market.

Imagine the generative AI content copypasta slop — and how God-awful annoying that’s become — but instead copying ideas, apps, and entire businesses.

If you can do it, I can do it. They can do it. AI can do it.

Go ahead and swear. Out loud. We’re all friends.

I have a three-pronged strategy for protecting your ideas in the AI world.

Launch later. Be Better. Lawyer up.

Here’s the thing. This isn’t a super new concern. Fly-by-nighters and ambitious newbies have been a competitive threat since the beginning of business. We as a society have just recently tripped the wire to where now your grandmother or your six-year-old nephew can do this stuff over a weekend on an iPhone.

We used to have to worry about them mistakenly buying a boat. Now we need to worry about them starting a third-party yacht-sharing marketplace, you know, for grins and giggles.

Launch later. I’ve got three startups I advise formally and another dozen or so I bullshit with. The ones that haven’t launched yet, I’ve been advising to wait until their moat goes beyond technology, into and maybe even through execution (“we do this better than anyone and we can prove it”), and even into having some traction on the flywheel.

I get questioned on that last part. Wait until we have a bunch of customers beating down our door before anyone knows who we are? Yeah. Figure it out. AI is great at copying tech and ideas, it’s terrible at copying connections and sales execution.

Be Better. That competitive moat, that execution traction, needs to have some visible wins.

One of the most competitive advantages we had at Automated Insights, where I helped invent the first commercially available generative AI, was that almost no one knew we existed until we launched Fantasy Football recaps with Yahoo.

Imagine trying to explain Claude to someone 15 years ago, let alone its benefits. All we had to do was ask, “Do you play fantasy football?” If the person answering didn’t, they at least knew someone who wouldn’t shut up about it.

Meanwhile, our competition, when explaining their own product, was now almost forced to ask, “Do you know that company that does those fantasy football recaps for Yahoo?”

We win.

Lawyer up. We’re only scratching the surface of look-alike facades for ideas, products, and companies. AI is the undisputed champion of creating look-alike facades. It’s, like, why it exists.

If you’re not thinking about protection — of IP, of assets, of data — from the inception of your idea, you’re just waiting for Leo DiCaprio to invade your dreams and put your head on some train tracks.

Seriously, legal protection as prevention is only going to be worth an ounce of cure, not even a whole pound, but abuse always follows these accidental patterns, and there is nowhere near enough remedy in the system to protect you on your own.

We’re already seeing AI eat its own tail, and in a lot of cases, people don’t care enough to differentiate between what’s real and what’s fake, let alone what’s valuable and what’s a facade.

We grizzled old entrepreneurs used to say, don’t worry about legal and HR until you need it. And while you don’t necessarily need an expensive attorney on call from Day 0, you should be thinking about all the ways you can avoid needing their expensive letterhead from the moment you say the name of your new company out loud.

In fact, you might want to do a quick URL and trademark search right now.

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