Should Anthropic trust Elon Musk to host its models? After users on X implied that Musk could wake up one day and simply boot the AI lab from SpaceX’s servers as a way to kneecap a rival, Musk replied with glowing praise for the AI lab. He said that such a trick was “not my style.”
“I was clearly wrong about Anthropic,” Musk wrote on Thursday, referring to his September 2025 post on X in which he said, “Winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic.” Of course, even at that time, Anthropic could already be considered a winner; the company was reported to have the biggest AI market share with enterprises.
It seems those anti-Anthropic days are behind Musk — and not just on X. As of July 2026, Anthropic is one of SpaceX’s largest customers.
To recap: Anthropic signed a deal in May to buy 300 megawatts of compute, the entire output of xAI’s Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee. (Musk’s xAI merged with SpaceX in February.) Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, a deal worth about $40 billion in revenue for SpaceX’s xAI unit. Google, by the way, also signed a deal to rent SpaceX infrastructure through June 2029, for $920 million per month.
Musk insists that this wasn’t a dangerous decision by Anthropic and that he’s full of admiration for the rival.
“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. And 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 offered as proof of his don’t-squeeze-competitors style Tesla’s decision in 2014 (which was outlined in a now deleted company blog post and now housed under its patent pledge) to not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use its technology. He also noted that Tesla opened its Supercharger network and charging port design to competitors.
“SpaceX launches competing satellite systems with no increase in price or use of unfair terms. Even my worst enemies can attack me on this platform,” he wrote, listing another example.
Of course, Musk is not exactly above tactics aimed at rivals, especially those with whom he has a history. He sued OpenAI, for instance.
Anthropic doesn’t have to rely on Musk’s sticking to his “style,” though. There would certainly be contractual consequences if Musk suddenly shut down Anthropic’s infrastructure. Not to mention the massive benefits for SpaceX to keep that deal intact. Not only does Anthropic pay handsomely, but also SpaceX’s engineers may learn how to build for, and support, Anthropic’s rapidly growing AI , just like Amazon’s engineers do.
That proximity might have other benefits as well. During his trial against OpenAI, Musk acknowledged that AI “distilling” was real — a process in which one model maker sets up many fake accounts to send prompts to a competitor in order to learn how it works. As the New York Times reported, when a lawyer asked him if xAI had ever distilled technology from OpenAI, Musk replied: “Generally AI companies distill other AI companies.”
Anthropic in February accused three Chinese model makers of doing this to Claude. Presumably, Anthropic and Google feel they have safeguards against SpaceX doing this while they are using its infrastructure. But hosting Anthropic’s compute could still give SpaceX greater visibility into how the company operates than most competitors would ever have.
There appears to be nothing but upside for Musk’s company in this partnership at the moment. As for tomorrow, and as the three-year contract ages, who knows?
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.