Elon Musk has kinder words for his rival (and now business partner) Anthropic.

In recent weeks, SpaceX’s CEO has taken a friendlier stance toward his competitor, praising the Anthropic team and its progress with its AI models. It’s a notable turnaround from the man who once called Anthropic “hypocritical,” “woke,” and an inevitable loser in the AI ​​race.

In an X post on Thursday, Musk openly said he was “clearly wrong about Anthropic.”

“They are obviously currently leaders in AI. No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable and they will no doubt have Mythos 2 ready soon,” Musk wrote, referring to Anthropic’s latest model releases.

In May, the two companies announced a deal that would give Anthropic access to the computing capacity of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center. Anthropic said the deal would give it access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity or more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.

SpaceX’s S-1 filing showed Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for computing power; although either party may terminate the agreement with 90 days’ notice.

The warmer tone marks a sharp change from comments Musk has previously made about Claude’s maker.

In January, Musk joked that “Anthropic’s destiny is to be misanthropic.” In February, he accused the company of stealing training data “on a massive scale” and called it “uppity, a prude and a hypocrite.” Later that month, he wrote that “Anthropic hates Western civilization.” In March he asked: “Is there a company more hypocritical than Anthropic?” and called Claude “woke,” accusing the company of instilling a left-wing bias in its models.

Musk also dismissed Anthropic’s chances in the AI ​​race. Last September, he wrote that “winning was never in the cards for Anthropic.”

Rivals, not enemies

Musk’s latest comment, calling Anthropic a leader in artificial intelligence, came in response to an X user who said SpaceX now has a “legitimate frontier model” that competes with Claude Opus 4.8.

“Also, Anthropic is completely dependent on the computer rented from SpaceXAI,” wrote the X user. “If Elon wanted to kill Anthropic, he could.”

Musk responded that he was clearly wrong about Anthropic and that he would “never isolate them in a way that seriously harms them, even as a competitor.”

“That’s not my style,” the CEO wrote.

Musk has praised Anthropic several times in the weeks since the partnership was announced. And recognition has spread beyond Anthropic models.

“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 I was impressed,” Musk wrote on May 6, the day the partnership was publicly announced. “Everyone I met was very competent and cared deeply about doing the right thing. No one set off my evil detector. As long as they do some critical self-examination, Claude will probably be good.”

Musk, however, has not forgotten that Anthropic is a rival to his own AI ambitions.

“Space (XAI) is only 3 years old. That’s half the age of Anthropic and a quarter of the age of OpenAI,” he wrote on May 26. “Let’s see where things are in 3 years.”

Spokespeople for Anthropic and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.