Elon Musk Praises Anthropic After It Becomes SpaceX’s Largest Customer
The public narrative around Elon Musk and Anthropic has flipped entirely. Just months ago, Musk posted that “winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic.” Now Anthropic is SpaceX‘s largest customer, paying $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for 300 megawatts of compute from xAI‘s Colossus 1 data center. A competitor Musk once dismissed is now hosting its most critical training and inference workload on Musk’s own infrastructure. The tension is obvious: can a company trust a rival CEO who has a history of lawsuits, public attacks, and admitted belief that AI companies routinely “distill” each other through controlled observation?
Musk responded to skepticism on X by praising Anthropic as “currently the leader in AI” and insisting that cutting them off is not his style. He pointed to Tesla’s 2014 patent pledge, its open Supercharger network, and SpaceX‘s refusal to inflate prices for competing satellite customers. But the article notes that contractual protections, not personal style, are what actually bind the deal. There are massive incentives for SpaceX to keep the relationship running smoothly: $40 billion in revenue over the contract’s life, and engineering exposure to Anthropic‘s scaling demands. Google also signed a separate deal for SpaceX infrastructure at $920 million per month through June 2029, making this a multi-tenant, multi-billion-dollar hosting arrangement.
A serious builder should recognize this as a case study in infrastructure dependency as competitive leverage. The same proximity that lets SpaceX engineers learn how to support Anthropic‘s workloads also gives them unusual visibility into a rival’s operational patterns. Musk himself acknowledged under oath that “generally AI companies distill other AI companies.” While contractual safeguards exist, the structural asymmetry of hosting a competitor’s compute cannot be fully eliminated by terms of service. The immediate upside for both parties is undeniable, but as the three-year contract ages, the question is not whether Musk will behave honorably, but whether the concentration of compute and hosting control over a direct competitor is a sustainable arrangement for either side.
