Elon Musk Backs Anthropic as SpaceX Deepens Multi-Billion-Dollar AI Infrastructure Partnership

Elon Musk has publicly praised Anthropic’s recent progress in artificial intelligence while reassuring users that SpaceX would not use its position as the company's infrastructure provider to gain a competitive advantage.

The comments came after discussions on X questioned whether Anthropic could be vulnerable because SpaceX hosts its AI computing infrastructure. Responding to those concerns, Musk said that disrupting a customer’s operations would not align with his approach to competition.

I was clearly wrong about Anthropic, Musk wrote, referring to an earlier 2025 post in which he had expressed scepticism about the company’s prospects.

SpaceX has become a major infrastructure provider for Anthropic

The relationship between the companies has expanded significantly during 2026. Anthropic agreed in May to purchase 300 megawatts of computing capacity, representing the full output of xAI’s Colossus 1 data centre near Memphis, Tennessee.

xAI became part of SpaceX following the companies’ merger earlier this year. Under the reported agreement, Anthropic will pay approximately $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, making the multi-year contract worth roughly $40 billion in revenue for SpaceX’s AI infrastructure business.

Google has also entered into a separate infrastructure agreement with SpaceX. According to publicly reported figures, Google’s contract runs through June 2029 and is valued at approximately $920 million per month.

Those agreements position SpaceX as a major provider of computing infrastructure for leading AI developers, even as its own AI business competes directly with many of those customers.

Musk calls Anthropic the current AI leader.

Musk used the discussion on X to praiseAnthropic’ss technology, describing the company as the current leader in artificial intelligence.

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,” Musk wrote.

To support that argument, Musk pointed to several previous business decisions. He referenced Tesla’s patent pledge, which allowed others acting in good faith to use the company’s technology without patent litigation. He also highlighted Tesla’s decision to open its Supercharger network and charging connector standards to other automakers.

Musk also said SpaceX launches competing satellite systems without engaging in unfair pricing practices and noted that even critics continue to use his social media platform.

Commercial incentives reinforce the partnership.

BeyondMusk’ss public assurances, the long-term commercial agreement provides significant financial incentives for both companies to maintain the partnership. Any interruption would likely have contractual consequences and put billions of dollars in future revenue at risk.

Hosting one of the world’s largest AI developers may also provide SpaceX engineers with operational experience supporting large-scale AI systems, similar to how cloud providers gain expertise by serving enterprise customers.

Industry attention remains focused on AI competition

The partnership has also renewed discussion about competition within the rapidly expanding AI sector. During legal proceedings involving OpenAI, Musk acknowledged that AI model distillation is widespread across the industry, describing it as a practice in which companies attempt to learn from competitors’ models.

Earlier this year, Anthropic accused three Chinese AI developers of attempting to distil capabilities from its Claude models. Those allegations underscored the growing importance of protecting proprietary AI technology as competition intensifies.

Although hosting infrastructure can provide operational visibility into customer workloads, there is no public evidence that SpaceX has misused access to customer systems. Companies using third-party infrastructure typically rely on contractual protections, technical safeguards, and security controls to protect proprietary data and models.