Musk's ten-month U-turn on Anthropic — from "winning was never possible" to "leader in AI", $40B lease outweighs the grudge
TL;DR
Musk reverses on July 9, calls Anthropic "obviously the leader in AI" and vows not to cut off SpaceX compute — ten months after saying "winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic."
Elon Musk posted an about-face on X on July 9, calling Anthropic "obviously currently the leader in AI" and pledging never to cut off its access to SpaceX compute, competitor or not. "I was clearly wrong about Anthropic," he wrote. "They are obviously currently the leader in AI. No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable." Asked whether he might weaponize infrastructure access, he added: "I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor. That's not my style."
Ten months earlier he said "winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic" — even though Anthropic already held the largest enterprise AI market share at the time.
The turn happened at the contract table. After xAI merged with SpaceX in February, Anthropic in May leased the entire Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee: 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, 300 MW of power, $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, roughly $40 billion in total. Either party can exit on 90 days' notice. The deal made Anthropic one of SpaceX's biggest cash customers overnight.
Musk's own xAI Grok competes head-on with Anthropic's products. He is now renting his cloud to that rival for $1.25 billion a month while publicly hyping their models. He anchored the promise in a longer list: Tesla's 2014 patent pledge, opening the Supercharger network to other automakers, SpaceX charging competing satellite systems the same launch prices.
Anthropic has not responded. Musk's last take on Claude Sonnet 5 in June was "still worse than Grok" — three weeks later Mythos/Fable shipped and beat both GPT and Grok on Terminal-Bench and SWE-Bench Pro. This time he even said he expects Mythos 2 to drop soon.
Win the bet, and "I won't pull the plug" lets Musk collect the full $40 billion Colossus 1 lease across three years and reshape xAI's capex profile. Lose it, and the 90-day exit clause triggers — if Anthropic migrates workloads to AWS Trainium or Google TPU, Musk isn't left with revenue, he's left with 300 MW of empty data center.
via TechCrunch / Washington Examiner / Axios / Sina Finance
Ten months earlier he said "winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic" — even though Anthropic already held the largest enterprise AI market share at the time.
The turn happened at the contract table. After xAI merged with SpaceX in February, Anthropic in May leased the entire Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee: 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, 300 MW of power, $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, roughly $40 billion in total. Either party can exit on 90 days' notice. The deal made Anthropic one of SpaceX's biggest cash customers overnight.
Musk's own xAI Grok competes head-on with Anthropic's products. He is now renting his cloud to that rival for $1.25 billion a month while publicly hyping their models. He anchored the promise in a longer list: Tesla's 2014 patent pledge, opening the Supercharger network to other automakers, SpaceX charging competing satellite systems the same launch prices.
Anthropic has not responded. Musk's last take on Claude Sonnet 5 in June was "still worse than Grok" — three weeks later Mythos/Fable shipped and beat both GPT and Grok on Terminal-Bench and SWE-Bench Pro. This time he even said he expects Mythos 2 to drop soon.
Win the bet, and "I won't pull the plug" lets Musk collect the full $40 billion Colossus 1 lease across three years and reshape xAI's capex profile. Lose it, and the 90-day exit clause triggers — if Anthropic migrates workloads to AWS Trainium or Google TPU, Musk isn't left with revenue, he's left with 300 MW of empty data center.
via TechCrunch / Washington Examiner / Axios / Sina Finance
