Elon Musk's SpaceX stunned many analysts earlier this week when the company announced a partnership with Anthropic. The AI giant Anthropic PBC has signed an agreement with SpaceX to bolster computing resources and meet surging demand for its Claude AI software. The compute deal brings together two of the biggest rivals in the race to develop more advanced AI systems.
Anthropic's Growing Demand and New Features
Anthropic has seen demand surge in recent months as more customers flock to use its AI coding tools. The announcement came as Anthropic held a developer day in San Francisco, where it unveiled a new Claude AI feature called "dreaming." This feature is meant to help its AI systems learn by reviewing work between sessions, spotting patterns, and updating files that store user preferences and other context.
Musk's Shift from Criticism to Partnership
What surprised many in Silicon Valley is the fact that Elon Musk has been a fierce critic of Anthropic. On several occasions in the past, including Anthropic's public fight with the Pentagon earlier this year, Musk has openly slammed the company. Talking about this deal, Musk said he spent time last week with senior staffers at Anthropic and decided to lease Colossus 1 to the company after making sure "Claude is good for humanity."
"No one set off my evil detector," he said in a post on X. "So long as they engage in critical self-examination, Claude will probably be good."
Condition Set by Elon Musk
However, seemingly as a lesson from his public fight with Sam Altman over OpenAI going for-profit from a non-profit, Elon Musk has set a condition. Replying to a post on X, Musk wrote, "Just as SpaceX launches hundreds of satellites for competitors with fair terms and pricing, we will provide compute to AI companies that are taking the right steps to ensure it is good for humanity. We reserve the right to reclaim the compute if their AI engages in actions that harm humanity. Doing our best to achieve a great future with amazing abundance for all." He added, "We will make mistakes, as to err is human, but always take rapid action to address them."
He added that SpaceX has moved its AI training efforts to Colossus 2 and that he would provide computing capacity to other AI companies that make similar efforts to favor humanity, like how SpaceX launches satellites for competitors with "fair terms and pricing."
Musk's Previous Criticism of Anthropic
Musk's latest comments mark a sharp shift from remarks he made in February, when he accused Anthropic's AI of bias. "Frankly, I don't think there is anything you can do to escape the inevitable irony of Anthropic ending up being misanthropic," he had written in an X post.
Details of the Anthropic-SpaceX Deal
Under the agreement, Anthropic will use the full computing power of SpaceX's Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, which reportedly houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors and will give the Claude chatbot maker 300 megawatts of new capacity within a month. The deal gives the IPO-bound SpaceX an important customer as it looks to sell investors on its AI ambitions, while helping Anthropic ease capacity constraints following a surge in demand for products such as its AI coding tool, Claude Code.
As part of the new agreement, Anthropic also reportedly said that it has "expressed interest in partnering with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity." Space-based orbital data centers are one of Musk's key goals and a major driver behind SpaceX's IPO.
