Musk Flips on Anthropic After $1.25B/Month Compute Deal

Elon Musk called Anthropic "the leader in AI" on Thursday, reversing years of public attacks on the startup. The shift followed a deal that gives Anthropic access to SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center.

The quote came from a post on X. Musk responded to a user named 'kache' who had taken a dig at Anthropic while praising SpaceXAI. The user claimed SpaceXAI had a frontier model that competes with Anthropic's Opus 4.8 and that Anthropic relies on short-term compute leases from SpaceX. "If Elon wanted to kill Anthropic, he could," the user wrote.

"I was clearly wrong about Anthropic," Musk wrote. "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."

Musk rejected the idea that he would cut Anthropic off. "I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor," he wrote. "That's not my style."

To explain his stance, Musk pointed to how he has treated competitors across his businesses. "Tesla open sourced its patents and we made the Supercharger network available to all competitors, even though we could have made it a walled garden," he noted. He also said SpaceX competes with other satellite operators without raising prices or imposing unfair terms. "Even my worst enemies can attack me on this platform," Musk added.

The change in tone is a sharp reversal. Musk had previously called Anthropic hypocritical and misanthropic. He joked in January that its "fate is to be misanthropic." In February, he accused the company of stealing training data "at massive scale" and called it smug and hypocritical. Later that month, he wrote that "Anthropic hates Western Civilization." In March, he asked, "Is there a more hypocritical company than Anthropic?" and called Claude "woke."

The change in tone coincides with a massive compute agreement. Anthropic will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for compute power, according to SpaceX's S-1 filing. The deal gives Anthropic access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity, or more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, Business Insider reported. Either side can terminate the agreement with 90 days' notice.

The deal shifts the AI compute market, analysts said. Anthropic secures long-term capacity. SpaceXAI monetizes its Colossus cluster. Nvidia gets a massive, recurring demand signal for its GPUs.

Nvidia shares traded at $202.78, down 0.66% on the session. The stock carries an Alpha Score of 71/100, a Moderate rating. Frontier AI compute demand remains insatiable, analysts said. The NVDA stock page tracks the market's read on this demand.

The agreement runs through May 2029. Anthropic is reportedly targeting an IPO at a valuation near $1 trillion.