Elon Musk stuns with a U-turn on Anthropic, calls it ‘the leader in AI’ after years of public spat

In a surprising U-turn, Elon Musk has gone from taking aim at Anthropic to applauding its progress in AI development. The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive recently said that the startup is “the leader in AI”.

His public spat with Sam Altman of OpenAI is well known. Anthropic too has frequently been in Musk's crosshairs. Over the years, he has called Anthropic "hypocritical," "misanthropic and evil," and an inevitable loser in the AI race.

Reversing his previous stance, Musk on Thursday acknowledged that he had been wrong about IPO-bound Anthropic, which has positioned itself as one of world’s most valuable AI startup, with a pre-IPO valuation of nearly $1 trillion.

"I was clearly wrong about Anthropic. 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," Musk tweeted on X, responding to a user who was taking a dig at Anthropic while praising Musk's SpaceXAI.

Musk says he would never hurt Anthropic despite being a competitor

The X user who goes by the username ‘kache’ dissed Anthropic while responding to one of Musk's older posts, in which the billionaire had said “Winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic.”

The user claimed that SpaceXAI now has a frontier AI model that competes with Anthropic's Opus 4.8 and added that Anthropic is reliant on computing capacity rented from SpaceXAI. "If Elon wanted to kill Anthropic, he could," the user wrote, referring to what they claimed was a short-term compute lease.

Musk who frequently engages with users on X, responded by rejecting the idea. “I would never cut them (Anthropic) off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor. That's not my style," he wrote.

To explain his stance, Musk pointed to how he has treated competitors across his businesses. "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,” he noted in the same X post.

He also said SpaceX competes with other satellite operators without raising prices or imposing unfair terms. "Even my worst enemies can attack me on this platform," Musk added, arguing that he does not believe in using his businesses or platform to unfairly disadvantage rivals.

SpaceX and Anthropic's partnership

Musk's change of heart about Anthropic came shortly after the two companies announced a deal that would give Anthropic access to compute capacity from SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center.

Anthropic said in May that the deal would give it access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity or more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, Business Insider reported at the time.

SpaceX's S-1 filing showed that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for compute power; though either side can terminate the agreement with 90 days' notice.

In January, Musk joked that Anthropic's “fate is to be misanthropic” and the following month, he accused the company of stealing training data "at massive scale" and called it "smug, sanctimonious and hypocritical."

Later that month, he wrote that "Anthropic hates Western Civilization." In March, he asked, "Is there a more hypocritical company than Anthropic?" and called Claude "woke," alleging that the company's AI models are trained to have a left-wing bias, according to the news publication.