Elon Musk has publicly changed his stance on AI startup Anthropic. Months after criticising it as “woke” and “hypocritical”, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO has praised the Claude maker. In a post shared on the microblogging site X, the world’s first trillionaire said he had been “clearly wrong” about the company and described it as the current leader in AI. He also said that he would not use SpaceXAI’s computing resources to harm a competitor.In his X post, Musk wrote, “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. And I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor. That’s not my style. 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. Even my worst enemies can attack me on this platform.”
How Elon Musk’s comments mark a shift from his earlier criticism
Musk’s latest remarks contrast with several comments he made about Anthropic earlier this year. In January, he joked that Anthropic’s “fate is to be misanthropic.” In February, he accused the company of stealing training data “at massive scale” and described it as “smug, sanctimonious and hypocritical.” Later that month, he wrote that “Anthropic hates Western Civilization.”In March, Musk asked, “Is there a more hypocritical company than Anthropic?” He also described Claude as “woke,” accusing the company of introducing left-wing bias into its AI models. Meanwhile, in September 2025, he also questioned the company’s prospects, writing that “winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic.”
Anthropic and SpaceXAI signed a compute partnership
The change in tone comes after Anthropic and SpaceXAI entered into a compute partnership announced in May. Under the agreement, Anthropic gained access to more than 300 megawatts of computing capacity at SpaceXAI’s Colossus 1 data centre, representing more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. According to SpaceX’s S-1 filing, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for the computing resources, although either company can terminate the agreement with 90 days’ notice.Musk’s latest post was in response to an X user who claimed that SpaceXAI now operates a frontier AI model that competes with Claude and suggested that Musk could cut off Anthropic’s computing access because it depends on SpaceXAI’s infrastructure.Musk rejected that suggestion, saying he would not take actions that would deliberately harm a competitor. The partnership also followed several positive remarks from Musk after the deal was announced.In May, Musk wrote, “I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed. Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing. No one set off my evil detector. So long as they engage in critical self-examination, Claude will probably be good.”Despite the recent praise, Musk has continued to describe Anthropic as a competitor in the AI industry. Later the same month, he wrote, “Space(XAI) is only 3 years old. That’s half the age of Anthropic and quarter the age of OpenAI. Let’s see where things stand 3 years from now.”