Musk calls Anthropic the ‘clear AI leader,’ reversing earlier criticism

Elon Musk on Thursday publicly acknowledged Anthropic as the leading company in artificial intelligence, admitting he was "clearly wrong" about the startup he had previously disparaged as unlikely to succeed. The remarks represent a striking reversal for the SpaceX and xAI chief, whose Grok models compete directly with Anthropic's Claude family.finance.yahoo+1

From Critic to Convert

Musk's praise focused on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models, which the company released on June 9 and which have been widely regarded as the most advanced AI systems available. The models were briefly taken offline after the U.S. government applied export controls on June 12, but access was restored on July 1 after the Commerce Department withdrew the restrictions.platform.claude+3

Musk also pledged not to "cut off" Anthropic or interfere with its access to computing resources — a pointed reassurance given that Anthropic has been leasing SpaceX's Colossus 1 supercomputer cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, since May. That deal, structured as a 180-day lease, gives Anthropic exclusive access to more than 220,000 Nvidia ↘ 0.66% GPUs and over 300 megawatts of compute capacity. Musk clarified in late May that the arrangement includes a mutual 90-day cancellation clause but said SpaceX "won't leave them hanging."kucoin+2

A Shifting Competitive Landscape

The concession comes at a moment of extraordinary momentum for Anthropic. Business Insider reported on Tuesday that the company's valuation had reached $1.2 trillion on secondary markets, up from a $965 billion post-money valuation in its $65 billion Series H round announced in late May. Anthropic ended 2025 with $9 billion in annual recurring revenue; that figure now exceeds $60 billion, according to SemiAnalysis.businessinsider+3

Meanwhile, SpaceXAI's own Grok 4.5, released this week, has shown strong benchmark results versus Claude Opus 4.8, Anthropic's current flagship on the Claude side. The competitive overlap makes Musk's endorsement all the more unusual — and suggests that the compute-leasing revenue SpaceX earns from Anthropic may be shaping his posture as much as any technical assessment.artificialanalysis+1

Enterprise Traction Drives the Shift

Anthropic's enterprise gains appear difficult to dismiss. The company's Fable 5 model, positioned as its most capable widely released system for reasoning and agentic work, is available across Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. ↗ 1.40% Bedrock, Google Alphabet Inc. ↘ 0.69% Cloud, and Microsoft ↗ 0.27% Foundry. Its coding-focused performance has driven particular adoption, contributing to more than $1 billion in quarterly profit.newsletter.semianalysis+1

Musk's reversal underscores how quickly the AI landscape has shifted — and how commercial entanglements between nominal competitors can reshape public rhetoric.