Musk has no plans to cut off Anthropic from SpaceX #
Elon Musk is popular for making bold predictions, but his latest claim may be his most ambitious yet.
X user Thomas D. raised a question if history will see the $7.5 billion to $40 billion SpaceX-Anthropic deal as the biggest unforced error of the AI era.
'Did the management team think XAI was too far from the frontier to be a real threat? Otherwise why give so much money to a direct competitor? Grok 4.5 is impressive and lands exactly where I thought it would a few months ago,' Thomas noted, adding that there is a scenario where users move to SpaceX for most token exchanges and Claude is only used for the top tasks.
In this case, Anthropic's massive growth would be transferred to SpaceX, which is currently reimbursed for its data centres, has access to premium data, and the option to build space AI infrastructure with the funds.
In response, Musk had said, 'You don't seem to understand that SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals.'
The statement came amid a wider debate over the growing relationship between SpaceX's AI infrastructure and Anthropic. Some investors questioned whether Anthropic made a strategic mistake by relying heavily on SpaceX's computing infrastructure while simultaneously competing against xAI.
The discussion was triggered by alleged claims that Anthropic's deal with SpaceX could strengthen one of its biggest rivals. However, some believe that if SpaceX continues improving its AI models while collecting billions of dollars in infrastructure revenue, the company could use those profits to accelerate development without shouldering the same financial burden.
Grok Fast-Approaching Perfection #
At the same time, X users have been highlighting that the latest versions of Grok are approaching frontier-level performance while operating at significantly lower costs than many competing models.
If businesses increasingly choose Grok for routine AI workloads while reserving Anthropic's Claude models for only the most demanding tasks, a significant portion of AI spending could gradually shift to Musk's ecosystem. AI companies need enormous computing budgets to stay competitive, and infrastructure providers increasingly have a strong hold in the market. Hence, some market participants argued that SpaceX now possesses a frontier model capable of leading the industry while simultaneously providing the infrastructure to rivals, which could theoretically enable Musk to pressure rivals by limiting access to computing resources.
Musk Says Anthropic Is the Current Leader in AI #
In a September 2025 X post, Musk had said that winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic. However, he made a U-turn yesterday by acknowledging that he was clearly wrong about Anthropic, and they are 'obviously' the current 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. That's not my style,' Musk wrote.
To reinforce his point, Musk highlighted how Tesla famously opened many of its EV patents to competitors and later expanded its Supercharger network for use by competitors. SpaceX also launches competing satellite systems without discriminatory pricing, while Musk pointed out that even his harshest critics continue to use his social media platform freely.
'Tesla open sourced its patents and we made the Supercharger network available to all competitors, even though we could have made it a walled garden. SpaceX launches competing satellite systems with no increase in price or use of unfair terms,' Musk noted.
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