Elon Musk has flipped from mocking Anthropic to calling it the AI “leader,” even as the rival lab becomes deeply dependent on his own compute infrastructure. The reversal raises questions over how much trust a competitor can place in a supplier controlled by its chief rival.

From harsh critic to confident competitor

Through late 2025 and early 2026, Musk repeatedly derided Anthropic, calling the company “hypocritical,” “woke,” and saying that “winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic.”¹ He also accused the Claude-maker of stealing training data “at massive scale” and claimed it “hates Western Civilization.”¹

By May 2026, the business reality had shifted. Anthropic signed a multi‑year deal to rent the entire 300‑megawatt output of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, securing access to more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.¹ SpaceX’s filings show Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, a commitment worth about $40 billion in revenue for Musk’s xAI unit after it merged with SpaceX in February.²

Public about‑face and new admiration

In July 2026, Musk publicly walked back his earlier attacks. “I was clearly wrong about Anthropic,” he wrote, adding: “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.”² Another report likewise notes Musk now “calls the AI rival the ‘leader’” and praises its team and models.¹

Musk also addressed fears that he could kneecap a rival that now relies on his hardware. Responding to users who argued he might “wake up one day and simply boot the AI lab from SpaceX’s servers,” he insisted such a move was “not my style” and promised, “I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor.”²

Musk’s narrative: rivalry without sabotage

To bolster that claim, Musk pointed to Tesla’s earlier pledge not to initiate patent lawsuits against good‑faith users of its technology, and to opening Tesla’s Supercharger network and charging port design to competitors.² He also cited SpaceX’s history of launching competing satellite systems “with no increase in price or use of unfair terms,” arguing this shows a longstanding reluctance to abuse platform power.²

At the same time, Musk continues to promote his broader AI ambitions across xAI, Tesla, and the Optimus robot, resharing praise that he is “working on the most important areas of A.I.”Elon Musk (elonmusk)³ That dual stance — vocally building his own frontier systems while declaring a key rival the current leader — underpins the unusual dynamic: Anthropic is both competitor and cornerstone customer.

How long that balance holds may depend less on Musk’s rhetoric than on contractual safeguards and the evolving AI race that both companies are racing to win.