Elon Musk has called Anthropic “Misanthropic” and “evil” and has claimed the company “hates Western Civilization.” Now he’s calling it a partner. On Wednesday, SpaceX (which recently absorbed xAI) announced that it will enter an agreement with the makers of Claude to allow it access to the computing power available at the massive Colossus data center.
According to Anthropic, the deal will allow it to crank back up some of the rate limits it has been throttling in recent weeks. In a press release, the company said it will double Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans and remove the peak-hours limit on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts, which saw paying subscribers getting cut off during most work hours. The company will also bump up the rate limits for API access to Claude Opus.
As for SpaceX (SpaceXAI?), the main thing that seems like it’ll get out of the deal is money. As the company is reportedly looking to go public later this year, it probably needs to bolster its books a bit to boost investor interest.
It also seems possible that it was just looking for someone to actually use all the compute that it built so hastily on the Colossus campus. The massive data center has 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs and 300 megawatt energy capacity, and xAI cut tons of corners to get it up and running. Colossus 2, which is supposed to reach 1 gigawatt of power, is up and running but not at maximum capacity. So perhaps Grok, the flagship AI model of the company formerly known as xAI, just isn’t generating enough demand to need all that processing power to itself.
Anthropic and SpaceX are odd bedfellows, given how the latter’s CEO has spoken about the former. In addition to the name-calling, Musk has also accused Anthropic of stealing data at a “massive scale” to train its models. So what caused Musk to change his mind? On X, he claimed to have “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 came away “impressed.” He also said, “No one set off my evil detector,” so he was fine with opening the doors of Colossus 1 to Anthropic while SpaceX moves to Colossus 2.
In the midst of this whole deal, Musk also announced that xAI would be dissolved and would become “SpaceXAI, the AI products from SpaceX.” So mark this as the beginning of the end of SpaceX’s otherwise sterling reputation. Now the company that makes a pornographic chatbot is the same one sending astronauts into space. It’s a very normal time to be alive.
