Elon Musk publicly acknowledged Anthropic as the leading company in artificial intelligence, admitting he was “clearly wrong” about the startup he had previously disparaged. His remarks denote a significant change for Musk, who heads SpaceX and xAI, businesses whose Grok models compete with Anthropic’s Claude models.
I was clearly wrong about Anthropic. 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.…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 9, 2026
Musk’s praise centered on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable models, released on June 9, which are regarded as among the most advanced AI systems available. The models faced a temporary offline period after the U.S. government imposed export controls on June 12, but access was restored on July 1 following the Commerce Department’s withdrawal of restrictions.
Musk assured that he would not “cut off” Anthropic or interfere with its access to computing resources. This reassurance is particularly relevant as Anthropic has been leasing SpaceX’s Colossus 1 supercomputer cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, since May. This 180-day lease grants Anthropic exclusive access to over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs and more than 300 megawatts of compute capacity. The lease includes a mutual 90-day cancellation clause, but Musk emphasized that SpaceX “won’t leave them hanging.”
Anthropic’s valuation reached $1.2 trillion on secondary markets, a significant increase from a $965 billion post-money valuation during its $65 billion Series H round announced in late May. The company reported an increase in annual recurring revenue from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $60 billion, according to SemiAnalysis.
In contrast, SpaceXAI’s Grok 4.5, released this week, showed strong benchmark results compared to Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8. This competitive overlap raises questions about Musk’s endorsement of Anthropic, suggesting financial ties stemming from the compute-leasing arrangement may be influencing his stance.
Anthropic’s Fable 5 model is available across platforms including Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry, signaling strong enterprise traction. The model’s performance, particularly in coding tasks, has contributed to more than $1 billion in quarterly profit, underscoring the impact of robust commercial gains.
