Elon Musk publicly reversed his earlier view of Anthropic on Thursday, saying he was "clearly wrong" to doubt the AI company and pledging not to use SpaceXAI’s compute leverage to harm a competitor.
Musk Calls Anthropic Current AI Leader
"I was clearly wrong about Anthropic," Musk wrote on X. "They are obviously currently the leader in AI. No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable and they will undoubtedly have Mythos 2 ready soon." TechCrunch reported that Musk was referring to his September 2025 post that said, "winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic."
Musk added that he would not cut off Anthropic’s access in a damaging way, even though Anthropic competes with his own AI business. "I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor. That’s not my style," he wrote.
He cited Tesla’s patent pledge, its decision to open the Supercharger network to rivals, SpaceX’s (NASDAQ:SPCX) pricing for competing satellite launches and X’s tolerance for criticism as examples of what he called fair competition. "Even my worst enemies can attack me on this platform," Musk wrote.
Anthropic Depends On SpaceXAI Compute Deal
The exchange followed a claim on X that SpaceXAI now runs a frontier model competitive with Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 while Anthropic depends on short-term compute leased from SpaceXAI. Anthropic signed a May deal for 300 megawatts of compute from xAI’s Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, paying $1.25 billion a month through May 2029.
SpaceXAI said in May that the partnership gives Anthropic access to Colossus 1, which includes more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and is designed for AI training, fine-tuning, inference and high-performance computing. SpaceXAI also said Anthropic plans to use the compute to improve capacity for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers.
The comments came after Anthropic’s June launch of Claude Fable 5 and restricted Mythos 5, while SpaceXAI countered July 8 with Grok 4.5, a model Axios described as aimed at coding and agentic work.
IPO Plans Add Public Market Stakes
Musk’s softer tone does not erase his history of hardball tactics. In May, OpenAI defeated Musk’s lawsuit accusing the company of straying from its founding mission, with a jury finding he sued too late.
Anthropic is also moving toward public markets. Reuters reported that the Claude maker confidentially filed for a U.S. initial public offering on June 1, though timing and terms remain undisclosed.
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