Should Anthropic trust Elon Musk to host its models? After X users hinted that Musk might wake up one day and simply boot the AI ​​lab from SpaceX’s servers as a way to defeat a rival, Musk responded with glowing praise for the AI ​​lab. He said that trick “wasn’t my style.”

“I was clearly wrong about Anthropic,” Musk wrote on Thursday, referring to his September 2025 post on X in which he said, “Winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic.” Of course, even at that point, Anthropic could already be considered a winner; The company was reported to have the largest AI market share among companies.

It seems those anti-anthropic days are behind us for Musk, and not just for X. As of July 2026, Anthropic is one of SpaceX’s largest customers.

Bottom line: Anthropic signed a deal in May to buy 300 megawatts of compute, the entire output of xAI’s Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee. (Musk’s XAI merged with SpaceX in February.) Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month through May 2029, a deal valued at about $40 billion in revenue for SpaceX’s xAI unit. Google, by the way, also signed an agreement to rent SpaceX’s infrastructure until June 2029, for $920 million per month.

Musk insists this was not a dangerous decision on Anthropic’s part and that he is full of admiration for the rival.

“They are obviously currently the leader in AI. No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable and they will no doubt have Mythos 2 ready soon. And I would never cut them in a way that seriously hurts them, even as a competitor. That’s not my style,” he wrote.

He offered as evidence of his style of not squeezing out competitors Tesla’s decision in 2014 (which was described in a now-deleted company blog post and now included in its patent commitment) not to pursue patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use its technology. He also noted that Tesla opened up its Supercharger network and charging port design to its competitors.

“SpaceX launches competing satellite systems without price increases or the use of abusive conditions. Even my worst enemies can attack me on this platform,” he wrote, listing another example.

Of course, Musk isn’t exactly above tactics aimed at his rivals, especially those with whom he has a history. For example, he sued OpenAI.

However, Anthropic doesn’t have to rely on Musk sticking to its “style.” There would certainly be contractual consequences if Musk suddenly shut down Anthropic’s infrastructure. Not to mention the enormous benefits to SpaceX of keeping that deal intact. Not only does Anthropic pay handsomely, but SpaceX engineers can learn how to build and support Anthropic’s fast-growing AI, just like Amazon engineers do.

That proximity could have other benefits, too. During his trial against OpenAI, Musk acknowledged that AI “distillation” was real: a process in which a model maker sets up many fake accounts to send messages to a competitor in order to learn how it works. As the New York Times reported, when asked by a lawyer if xAI had ever distilled technology from OpenAI, Musk responded: “Usually, AI companies distill other AI companies.”

Anthropic in February accused three Chinese model makers of doing this to Claude. Presumably Anthropic and Google feel they have safeguards against SpaceX doing this while using their infrastructure. But hosting Anthropic computing could still give SpaceX greater visibility into how the company operates than most competitors would have.

It seems that for the moment there are nothing but advantages for Musk’s company in this partnership. As for tomorrow, and as the three-year contract ages, who knows?