TLDR
- Musk posted on X that he was “clearly wrong about Anthropic” and called it the current leader in AI
- Anthropic and SpaceX signed a compute deal in May worth $1.25 billion per month through 2029
- Musk previously called Anthropic “woke,” “hypocritical,” and said winning was never possible for them
- Anthropic confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO in June after reaching a near-$1 trillion valuation
- Claude’s coding tools and Cowork product helped drive Anthropic’s rapid growth over the past year
Elon Musk has reversed his long-standing criticism of Anthropic, calling the AI startup the current frontrunner in the industry. The comment came in an X post on Thursday, where Musk wrote that he was “clearly wrong about Anthropic.”
“They are obviously currently the leader in AI,” Musk wrote. “No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable and they will undoubtedly have Mythos 2 ready soon.”
I 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.
And I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor.…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 9, 2026
A Sharp Reversal From Months of Attacks
The praise is a dramatic shift from Musk’s earlier comments. In January, he joked that Anthropic’s “fate is to be misanthropic.” In February, he accused the company of stealing training data “at massive scale.” That same month he wrote that “Anthropic hates Western Civilization.”
In March, Musk called Claude “woke” and accused Anthropic of embedding left-wing bias into its models. Last September, he wrote that “winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic.”
The change in tone followed a major business deal between the two companies. In May, SpaceX and Anthropic announced a compute partnership giving Anthropic access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity from SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center. That equals more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.
SpaceX’s S-1 filing shows Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029. Either party can exit with 90 days’ notice.
Musk Says He Would Not Cut Them Off
Musk’s Thursday post came in response to an X user who suggested SpaceX could “kill Anthropic” by cutting off compute access. Musk pushed back on that idea.
“I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor,” he wrote. “That’s not my style.”
On May 6, the day the partnership was announced, Musk said he spent time with senior Anthropic staff and came away impressed. “Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing,” he wrote.
Musk still views Anthropic as a rival. On May 26, he noted that his own AI venture is only three years old, half the age of Anthropic, and said he wants to see where things stand in another three years.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives including CEO Dario Amodei. Its Claude Code tool gained traction among software developers, and its Cowork product expanded its reach to non-technical users.
The company confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO in June, weeks after a funding round valued it at roughly $965 billion. Spokespeople for both Anthropic and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
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