Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, highlighting the challenges posed by healthcare conglomerates.
On Sunday, Cuban took to X to argue that the increasing use of AI in the sector is not necessarily beneficial due to the interference of healthcare conglomerates. According to Cuban, the doctors spend at least 25% of their time dealing with healthcare conglomerates, which he said make care more difficult and expensive for both physicians and patients.
It's not. Why ? Because 25 pct or more of a doctor's time is spent dealing with conglomerates that do all they can to make the doctor's care more difficult, and expensive, for both the doctor and patient.
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) July 12, 2026
For every future agent we give AI doctors to deal with this friction,… https://t.co/vDWgjLgsMk
“For every future agent we give AI doctors to deal with this friction, and to improve the quality of care, the conglomerates will have multiple adversarial agents doing all they can to delay and deny, to minimize their cost and maximize their float,” Cuban wrote.
The Shark Tank star’s post was a response to venture capitalist Marc Andreesen’s post about AI already being a better doctor than “99.99% of human doctors.”
Cuban argued that employers, including Andreessen Horowitz, lack visibility into the true cost of healthcare for employees. He claimed insurers, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and other healthcare intermediaries have incentives to block the successful adoption of AI doctors and agents because greater cost transparency could threaten their business models.
“If you want to see that change, stop working with the healthcare conglomerates. Write agents that define, optimize and contract directly with providers, to eliminate the unnecessary middlemen,” stated Cuban.
AI Debate Over Medical Care
On Saturday, Andreessen reignited the AI-in-healthcare debate after endorsing an OpenAI finding that physicians identified fewer flaws in GPT-5.6’s medical responses than in doctor-written answers, echoing CEO Sam Altman’s comments on the model’s evaluation results.
Before that, Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk said the company’s Optimus humanoid robot and AI efforts could one day make high-quality healthcare universally accessible. He highlighted that highly dexterous humanoid robots could eventually provide medical care superior to what even the world’s wealthiest people can access today.
In April, A new West Health-Gallup survey found that 25% of U.S. adults have used AI tools or chatbots for health information or advice, signaling growing adoption as a supplement to, not a replacement for, traditional medical care.
Despite growing adoption, trust in AI-generated health information remains low, with only 4% of recent users strongly trusting its accuracy and 11% reporting unsafe advice. The findings come as AI investment in healthcare accelerates, including Roche Holding AG (OTC:RHHBY)‘s AI infrastructure expansion powered by Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Alphabet Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) partnership with DocMorris to roll out AI-powered symptom-check and prescription tools.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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