Start-up: plagiarism by AI paralyzes entrepreneurs... and French Tech?

After the happy start-up nation, the fearful start-up nation. French Tech entrepreneurs, who loved nothing more than exchanging their findings with a cocktail in hand, are now bathed in mutual distrust, and this could end up playing tricks on them. “The fear of sharing one's ideas because of AI is gaining ground everywhere. Among start-up founders, we talked a lot about this subject at the Gemini Startup Forum Cybersecurity, a short time ago. We all agreed: as soon as we have a good idea, we don't talk about it!”, says Gautier Bugeon, co-founder and CEO of MokN, a young French cybersecurity start-up, launched in 2024. Their fear? Let competitors copy their ideas using AI. “At dinners and cocktails, I actually notice that start-up CEOs are now reluctant to share their ideas for fear that they will be copied,” confirms Tristan Duranté-Koudella, co-founder and CEO of Studeria, an AI consulting and training start-up, founded in 2022.

“Before, when a company released a product, it specified lots of technical details to explain to prospects how it worked. A blog post often gave even more information on its development. But that’s over!”, insists Gautier Bugeon. Not without reason. He is convinced that MokN's competitors have already used specifications that the start-up provided on one of its innovations to reproduce it using AI. “We were a little too talkative about this innovation. I participated in conferences filmed and broadcast on YouTube to talk about it and discuss technical details. And I found them in other products,” he regrets. “AI has broken down the technical barrier of entry to the launch of many projects. Before, to copy an idea, you needed a lot of resources. Now, this barrier has completely collapsed,” analyzes Lucas Goumarre, co-founder and CEO of Korben For People, a start-up specializing in robotics.

“AI is in fact used to search for all the details of a product: blog posts, various documents, filmed conferences, webinars... Then, from all this information, the AI ​​generates a product implementation plan,” explains Gautier Bugeon. It is to avoid experiencing such a misadventure that Lucas Goumarre refuses to discuss Korben For People's projects. "When I speak in public, I mainly talk about the past and present of the company, but never about its roadmap, and therefore the future. Because if I talk about my roadmap, I know that I can be caught up extremely quickly with two or three developers and AI. With AI, it would even be possible to guess the steps planned in my roadmap, and to execute them before me. AI increases tenfold the ability to catch up with a company by copying its ideas", fears Lucas Goumarre.

Another mishap suffered by the co-founder of MokN: shortly after the launch of his first solution, he leafed through the brochure of the latest product from one of his competitors. Surprise: he found the technical documentation for his solution, “to the word”. “My competitor was able to quickly develop his product thanks to this documentation and AI. Now, with AI, it is possible to develop a copied idea in two weeks: the copy is worse than the original, but it works.” This documentation was only available from an environment dedicated to demonstrations, which MokN uses in trade shows for prospects. “They had to send someone to our stand who wrote down the domain names we use for our demonstration environment,” he complains.

Machine-translated from French