Playing Fair in the Compute Wars: Why Elon Musk Won’t Pull the Plug on His Biggest AI Rivals
A wild theory started floating around on social media recently. Users on X suggested that Elon Musk might wake up one morning and suddenly boot Anthropic off his servers just to crush a major competitor. Because Anthropic builds the famous Claude models and competes directly with Musk’s own artificial intelligence projects, tech fans wondered if Musk would use his massive server empire as a weapon. Musk quickly hopped online to shoot down the rumors, offering heavy praise for his rival and claiming that pulling a sneaky stunt like that is simply not his style.
Musk even looked back at his past predictions, pointing out a social media post he wrote in September 2025. In that post, he admitted he was totally wrong about Anthropic’s future, noting that failure was never an option for them. Today, the anti-Anthropic stance seems to belong entirely to internet observers rather than Musk himself. In fact, as of July 2026, Anthropic stands as one of the largest customers for Musk’s hardware empire.
The financial setup explains why a sudden shutdown makes zero sense. Back in May, Anthropic signed a massive infrastructure deal to buy 300 megawatts of computing power from the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. That data center belongs to xAI, which officially merged into SpaceX earlier this year. Under this contract, Anthropic pays a staggering $1.25 billion every single month through May 2029. That brings the total value of the deal to a whopping $40 billion in guaranteed revenue for SpaceX’s computational unit. Google signed a similar massive agreement to rent space on the exact same server infrastructure, shelling out $920 million per month through the summer of 2029.
With that much cash flowing into his businesses, Musk insists that Anthropic made a smart bet rather than a dangerous gamble. He openly calls them the current leaders in the software space, praising their current Mythos and Fable models. He even teased that their upcoming Mythos 2 system will arrive ahead of schedule. Musk claims he would never cut off a competitor just to hurt them, pointing to his history with other businesses as proof of his open philosophy. He brought up Tesla’s famous 2014 patent pledge, where he promised not to sue anyone who used Tesla’s electric vehicle tech in good faith, which eventually led to opening the Supercharger network to rival automakers. He also noted that SpaceX regularly launches competing communication satellites into orbit without hitting those companies with unfair pricing or restrictive contract terms.
Anthropic does not have to rely entirely on Musk’s good word to protect its operations. Legal teams built heavy contractual penalties into the agreement to protect Anthropic’s digital infrastructure if SpaceX ever tried to turn off the power arbitrarily. Beyond the raw cash, hosting these models brings massive hidden benefits to Musk’s teams. By running these workloads, SpaceX engineers get a front-row seat to learn how top-tier teams build, scale, and support modern software architectures. While the long-term future of the three-year contract remains open, the current partnership offers nothing but massive financial upside and tech insights for Musk’s empire.
