It wasn’t long ago when Elon Musk couldn’t resist the temptation to take a jibe at Anthropic’s controversy, post the declaration of the company achieving a $30 billion in funding, raising its valuation to $380 billion at the time. Musk, in one of his responses to Anthropic, openly criticised Anthropic, labelling the company “misanthropic” and questioning its approach to AI development. Today, however, that narrative has been dissolved, and there’s now a new strategic partnership in place. Musk has joined hands with Amodei to ink a deal that benefits both parties.
Musk’s SpaceX has granted Anthropic full access to its massive Colossus 1 data centre in Memphis – home to over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs and more than 300 megawatts of power. The deal instantly boosted Claude’s capabilities, doubling rate limits for Claude Code, eliminating peak-hour restrictions, and raising API limits for enterprise users.
Following a meeting with senior Anthropic leaders last week, Musk publicly declared he was “impressed” and that “no one set off my evil detector.”
“Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing. No one set off my evil detector. So long as they engage in critical self-examination, Claude will probably be good,” wrote Musk.
Such a rapid shift from a harsh critic to a professional collaborator shows how commercial ambitions and mutual rivalry with OpenAI have reset the priorities for Musk.
Musk doesn’t like Sam Altman, so does Dario Amodei
Presently, Elon Musk is part of a federal lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman, accusing them of letting go of the company’s nonprofit goals for profit-driven motives. Musk was part of the original founding team at OpenAI, guiding the firm in its early years as a non-profit company focused on AI’s development for humanity. Musk eventually had to quit the board after differences deepened with Altman.
Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic after leaving OpenAI in 2021 over concerns about AI’s safety and direction under Altman, has long positioned himself and his company as a more responsible alternative. Amodei even stood his ground against the US Department of Defense for ensuring its AI isn’t used in dangerous applications.
Hence, both Musk and Amodei have Sam Altman as a common opponent. Anthropic reported explosive 80x year-over-year growth in revenue and usage in Q1 2026, far surpassing internal 10x projections. The new compute access from Musk’s SpaceX provides immediate relief from capacity constraints that were limiting growth, especially with the ever-expanding popularity of Claude.
The two companies also showed interest in jointly developing multiple gigawatts of orbital AI infrastructure using SpaceX’s rocket technology.
SpaceX, Anthropic prioritise business over differences
For Musk, the deal brings greater benefits:
– It monetises previously underutilised capacity at the Colossus 1 compute facility, originally built in partnership with xAI.
– It generates high-margin revenue for SpaceX just weeks ahead of its highly anticipated IPO listing, thus helping strengthen the balance sheet and avoid potential write-downs.
For Amodei:
– The partnership delivers Anthropic the scale needed to keep pace with surging demand for Claude.
– Despite the SpaceX partnership, Anthropic’s longer-term cloud contracts with Amazon, Google, and others continue to expand.
At a time when the Musk vs. Altman lawsuit continues to expose internal issues at OpenAI, the Musk-Amodei partnership could set an example of how two arch rivals can come together to push forward their professional ambitions, setting aside public disagreements.
Will Musk prioritise Anthropic Claude over xAI’s Grok?
That seems highly unlikely, considering Musk decided to push Grok’s training to the newer Colossus 2 supercomputer. Musk would still prefer pushing the development of his in-house AI model over prioritising any partnership with one of its rivals.
Think of the Anthropic and SpaceX deal with a different angle – Musk is renting out his unused supercomputers to Anthropic, while developing Grok on a different one simultaneously.
Grok remains crucial to Musk’s broader ecosystem, deeply integrated with X, Tesla, and his vision for a “maximum truth-seeking” AI.