Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images
- Elon Musk previously criticized Anthropic over its business practices and its AI model behavior.
- In recent weeks, the SpaceX CEO made an about-face, praising his rival.
- Anthropic has a partnership with SpaceX to access computing power from Colossus 1.
Elon Musk has kinder words for his rival — and now business partner — Anthropic.
In recent weeks, the CEO of SpaceX has struck a friendlier posture toward his competitor, praising Anthropic's team and its progress with its AI models. It's a notable about-face from the man who once called Anthropic "hypocritical," "woke," and an inevitable loser in the AI race.
In an X post on Thursday, Musk said outright that he was "clearly wrong about Anthropic."
"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 wrote, referring to Anthropic's latest model releases.
In May, the two companies announced a deal that would give Anthropic access to compute capacity from SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center. Anthropic said the deal would give it access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity or more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.
SpaceX's S-1 filing showed that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for compute power; though either side can terminate the agreement with 90 days' notice.
The warmer tone is a sharp shift from the comments Musk has previously made about the Claude maker.
In January, Musk joked that Anthropic's "fate is to be misanthropic." In February, he accused the company of stealing training data "at massive scale" and called it "smug, sanctimonious 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," accusing the company of instilling left-wing bias into its models.
Musk also dismissed Anthropic's chances in the AI race. Last September, he wrote that "winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic."
Rivals, not enemies
Musk's latest comment, deeming Anthropic a leader in AI, came in response to an X user who said SpaceX now has a "legitimate frontier model" that competes with Claude Opus 4.8.
"Also, Anthropic is completely reliant on the compute rented from SpaceXAI," the X user wrote. "If Elon wanted to kill anthropic, he could."
Musk responded that he was clearly wrong about Anthropic and that he "would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor."
"That's not my style," the CEO wrote.
Musk has praised Anthropic several times in the weeks after the partnership's announcement. And the recognition has extended beyond Anthropic's models.
"I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed," Musk wrote on May 6, the day the partnership was publicly announced. "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."
Musk, though, hasn't forgotten that Anthropic is a rival to his own AI ambitions.
"Space(XAI) is only 3 years old. That's half the age of Anthropic and quarter the age of OpenAI," he wrote on May 26. "Let's see where things stand 3 years from now."
Spokespeople for Anthropic and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
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