Lovable once said it's competing with large AI labs, not other vibe-coding companies. Mark Cuban thinks it has a leg up on those guys, too.
At a conference in Paris on Wednesday, the "Shark Tank" investor said that AI coding services like Lovable have add-on services that could prevent them from being replaced by AI labs.
"When we question a lot of the front ends like Lovable, Replit, etc, we wonder if the foundational models, the big guys are going to just replace them," Cuban said at a talk with Lovable CEO Anton Osika. "But what you're saying is you have a base of data that is localized that applies not only to startups and entrepreneurs, but to any business that's looking to grow."
Cuban, a Lovable investor, was referring to Osika's comments. The founder said that Lovable has moved from being a tool for writing code to a more all-inclusive platform — founders can incorporate their businesses and set up their payment systems, for example.
"People saw us as an AI software engineer, the product. Now what we're increasingly seeing is that people see Lovable as their partner, as literally their AI cofounder," Osika said.
Cuban's comments follow a period of brutal comparisons between products made by vibe-coding startups and Anthropic's Claude Code.
After Anthropic released Opus 4.6 earlier this year, founders and developers said on X that they were ditching their Cursor and Lovable subscriptions for Claude Code.
Founders and investors often compare AI applications, such as vibe-coding tools, to the capabilities of large language models. They are concerned that they may build or invest in a product that cannot defend itself against a new feature from Anthropic or OpenAI.
Lovable, too, has acknowledged this threat.
In a March podcast, Lovable's head of growth, Elena Verna, said that other vibe-coding players are not her biggest concern.
"I always worry about the big boys and girls in the world," Verna said. "So, OpenAIs, Anthropics, Googles, Apples, more so than our competitors that spring up from the bottom or from sideways."
This is because the distribution power of these tech giants and frontier labs in the market is unparalleled, she said.
