Elon Musk has publicly reversed his stance on Anthropic, calling the AI lab “clearly the leader in AI” and promising not to cut off its access to the xAI compute infrastructure it relies on, a remarkable concession from a man whose own companies, including xAI and SpaceX, compete directly with Anthropic.
“I was clearly wrong about Anthropic,” Musk wrote, referring to his September 2025 post in which he declared that “winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic.” He praised the company’s Mythos and Fable models as the best available and said he expects Mythos 2 soon.
The statement carries unusual weight because Musk’s xAI, now merged with SpaceX, holds enormous leverage over Anthropic. In May 2026, Anthropic signed a deal to buy the entire 300-megawatt output of xAI’s Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, paying approximately US$1.25 billion per month (approximately £1.0 billion) through May 2029, totaling roughly US$40 billion in revenue for the SpaceX-owned xAI unit. Google signed a separate, smaller deal with SpaceX as well.
Musk insisted that he would “never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor. That’s not my style.” He cited Tesla’s open patent pledge, the opening of Tesla’s Supercharger network to competitors, and SpaceX launching competing satellite systems without unfair terms as evidence of his approach.
The relationship is not without tension. Musk sued OpenAI and lost in May 2026. He has also acknowledged that “generally AI companies distill other AI companies,” a reference to the common, and often controversial, practice of training models on competitors’ outputs. Anthropic has previously accused Chinese model makers of distilling from Claude.
However, the financial incentives cut both ways. Anthropic is now one of SpaceX’s largest customers, and the contract terms almost certainly include significant penalties for any abrupt termination of compute services. Hosting Anthropic’s operations also gives SpaceX engineers insight into running large-scale AI workloads at the frontier of the industry, a learning opportunity that Musk himself acknowledged.
Sources: Elon Musk praises Mythos/Fable, promises not to cut off Anthropic (TechCrunch, Jul 9, 2026)