The xAI founder admitted he was 'clearly wrong' about the Claude maker, praising its latest models as unmatched by competitors
Elon Musk, the man who once called Anthropic “missanthropic” and “hypocritical,” now says the company is the best in the business. In a post on X on July 9, Musk wrote that he was “clearly wrong about Anthropic” and that “they are obviously currently the leader in AI.”
This is the same Musk who, just four months ago, predicted Anthropic would fail in the AI landscape. Musk’s specific praise centered on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable AI models, which he indicated were unmatched by competitors.
In May 2026, Anthropic signed a short-term compute lease, 180 days with extension options, at xAI’s Colossus 1 data center. That facility houses 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, making it one of the largest AI training clusters on the planet. In other words, Anthropic is literally paying Musk’s company for the computing power to build the models he’s now calling best-in-class.
Anthropic’s meteoric rise by the numbers #
The company raised $65 billion in May 2026, pushing its valuation to a staggering $965 billion. Anthropic confidentially filed for a US IPO around June 1, 2026. The timing of Musk’s praise, coming roughly five weeks after that filing, is worth noting.
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, including Dario and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic has been aggressively poaching talent from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and even Musk’s own xAI throughout 2026.
What this means for crypto and tech investors #
Anthropic’s near-trillion-dollar valuation raises questions about how much of the AI premium is already priced into related assets. At $965 billion, the company is valued higher than most crypto protocols combined. If Anthropic’s IPO proceeds as expected, it could create a new benchmark for how public markets value AI companies, which in turn affects how investors allocate between AI-adjacent crypto tokens and traditional tech equity.
The compute-sharing arrangement between Anthropic and xAI suggests that even fierce competitors recognize the economics of collaboration when it comes to GPU access. For investors watching the AI race, Musk’s reversal highlights a key risk: in March 2026, Musk was predicting Anthropic’s demise; by July, he’s calling them the leader.
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