Elon Musk and Anthropic are going to space to find electricity.

Elon Musk successfully disgusted his biggest enemy, Anthropic, and has now gained his own legendary hero.

Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily

Elon Musk and Anthropic have surprisingly teamed up!

On the early morning of May 7th, Beijing time, a joint announcement from Anthropic and SpaceX instantly shocked the entire AI community. According to the announcement, both parties have signed a cooperation agreement, Anthropic will use the full computing power capacity of SpaceX’s Colossus1 data center, providing over 300 megawatts of new computing power within a month (equivalent to over 220k NVIDIA GPUs), directly improving the user experience for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers.

This is the first time Elon Musk’s business empire has reached such a direct, formal, and large-scale cooperation with Anthropic. Over the past years, Anthropic’s core partners have always been Amazon and Google, whether in cloud infrastructure, chip supply, or model training, Anthropic has long been deeply tied to AWS and Google TPU systems. Musk has never publicly invested in Anthropic, and has even publicly criticized its AI safety approach and political tendencies multiple times. There had been almost no public record of infrastructure collaboration, model cooperation, or business alliances between the two before.

When the most capable large model company and the most talked-about world’s richest man finally connect, the partnership naturally carries a sense of buzz.

Musk’s Little Tricks

For Musk, the more subtle aspect of this cooperation lies in the timing.

Just ten days ago (April 27), Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI officially entered the trial phase in the Northern District of California federal court. In recent court appearances, both sides have exchanged barbs, with a tense atmosphere. This lawsuit, regarded by outsiders as the “biggest AI case of the era,” has almost fully publicized Musk’s long-standing grudge against OpenAI.

And Anthropic is precisely one of OpenAI’s most core and direct competitors at present. So this partnership naturally adds an intriguing layer — the enemy of my enemy is my friend; as long as it makes OpenAI uncomfortable, Musk will do anything.

From the perspective of AI competition dynamics, this also signals an evolution in Musk’s strategic layout in the AI era.

On the surface, it’s just a standard compute resource deal — SpaceX provides GPU clusters, Anthropic gains more inference resources, each side benefits. But it’s clearly more complex than that.

Because Musk’s recent AI-related activities are no longer just “building models.” Over the past two years, Musk personally launched xAI (which has now merged into SpaceX and been renamed SpaceXAI), and the outside world increasingly views OpenAI, Anthropic, and other large model companies as Musk’s potential competitors. But with the construction and deployment of the supercomputing cluster Colossus, data center capabilities are spilling over, and Musk’s role has quietly shifted.

Today, Musk is increasingly resembling an “arms dealer” in the AI world — anyone lacking computing power can come to him, even former potential rivals.

Anthropic, embroiled in the “dumbing down” controversy, finally has a legendary hero

For Anthropic, this cooperation might be even more significant than it appears.

In recent months, Claude’s reputation has been subtly changing. On one hand, Claude Opus 4.7 and the mysterious Mythos are still regarded as some of the best models on the market; but on the other hand, voices claiming Claude has “dumbed down” have been growing louder in the community.

This sentiment is especially evident among heavy developers. Some have found that Claude’s reasoning ability sharply declines when handling long code or complex engineering tasks; reports have also pointed out that Claude’s “thinking budget” or response length has been significantly reduced; more retail users have reported that Claude’s hallucinations are worsening, and the model is more prone to “seriously talking nonsense” when dealing with complex information.

After the “dumbing down” controversy intensified, Anthropic’s official released a technical review report, admitting that between March and April, due to product adjustments and bugs, Claude’s performance in complex tasks experienced “performance degradation.”

However, this explanation did not convince the market; public opinion still generally believes that high inference costs and compute shortages are the main reasons for the performance fluctuations of large models like Claude in practical applications.

The more powerful the model, the higher the inference cost; the larger the user base, the more terrifying the GPU consumption. All AI companies face a fundamental business dilemma — users want models to run “at full capacity” forever, but companies must control costs. So dynamic rate limiting, inference budget adjustments, response length controls, priority scheduling… these mechanisms almost inevitably appear, and users ultimately perceive it as “dumber models.”

This is why the compute partnership with SpaceX is so critical for Anthropic.

In the announcement, Anthropic stated that with this cooperation, the experience of core Claude users will be directly improved:

• First, Anthropic will double the five-hour usage quota for Claude Code on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans billed by seat.

• Second, Anthropic will remove rate limiting on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts during peak hours.

• Third, Anthropic will significantly increase the API rate limits for Claude Opus models.

AI model evaluation expert Alex Finn commented on this cooperation, stating that Anthropic has been somewhat dormant in recent months, with reduced quotas and a “dumber” model… and now Musk is coming to the rescue, giving Anthropic the chance to use the world’s largest supercomputing cluster. Anthropic’s compute crisis has long been the Achilles’ heel of the company, dragging down user reputation and market sentiment, but Musk’s one deal has solved this problem.

Alex Finn used a metaphor more familiar to American sports fans: “Musk’s help is like giving Anthropic a Vembanyama!”

Final Fantasy — Going to Space for Power

In the cooperation announcement, there’s a small detail many people overlooked — “Both parties are also interested in jointly developing several gigawatt-level orbital AI compute.” In plain language, Musk and Anthropic want to move AI data centers into space. It sounds like science fiction, but the underlying issue is very real.

A top analyst in the AI circle, Aakash Gupta, explained: “On Earth, electricity, land, and heat dissipation capacity can no longer meet the growing demand fast enough.”

Anthropic has now locked in about 15 gigawatts of compute capacity, equivalent to the power consumption of 11 million households, but that’s still not enough… Nvidia can produce chips, Anthropic has enough money, but what cannot be built on time are the electricity, land, and cooling infrastructure — and the growth rate of model demand far exceeds the speed of building these infrastructures.

The frontier of compute race has now begun to leap beyond Earth. And only one company worldwide has the capability to send gigawatt-scale solar arrays into orbit — SpaceX.

If this interstellar story eventually becomes reality, only Musk might be capable of making it happen.