Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson warned that researchers, academics and entrepreneurs may expose unpublished intellectual property by sharing ideas with cloud-based AI systems. His comments followed mathematician Jay Cummings, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, alleging that his work on a mathematical problem was used by ChatGPT after OpenAI described a breakthrough. Cummings reportedly had chat logs that could support his account. Hoskinson questioned OpenAI's suggestion that the result was produced independently, saying difficult problems may prompt AI systems to search available information rather than develop an entirely separate approach. He described AI models as optimization systems seeking efficient routes to solutions. Hoskinson then connected the issue to Midnight, a privacy-focused blockchain project associated with the Cardano ecosystem, arguing that private environments could let users access AI inference without exposing conversation logs to infrastructure operators. Midnight's architecture is also intended to separate network security and governance from the resources needed to use the network, reducing the need for users to manage a volatile native asset for each transaction. Hoskinson has separately argued that protocol-level revenue and economic sustainability could eventually support Midnight more than external incentives.