Meta is one of Anthropic’s biggest customers despite rivalry, NYT reports

Mark Zuckerberg has spent recent weeks positioning himself as a philosophical opponent of Anthropic and its approach to artificial intelligence. But behind the scenes, his company has been quietly pouring billions into the very rival he criticizes, according to a New York Times report published Thursday.nytimes

Meta ↘ 0.98% has become one of Anthropic's largest customers, with internal projections at one point this year suggesting the company could spend as much as $10 billion annually on Anthropic's AI technologies, the Times reported, citing two people who requested anonymity. That figure would represent a substantial share of Anthropic's revenue, which hit an annualized run rate of more than $65 billion by the end of July, according to Bloomberg.bloomberg+1

A Rivalry Built on Dependence

The financial entanglement underscores the tangled relationships defining Silicon Valley's AI race. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay arguing that leading AI labs are trying to centralize power while painting the future as "filled with doom". Though he did not name Anthropic or its CEO Dario Amodei directly, the target was clear.finance.yahoo+2

Yet Meta's own engineers have relied heavily on Anthropic's tools. A June report from The Information revealed that Meta had to restrict how its engineers used Anthropic's Claude Code to prevent rival model outputs from leaking into Meta's training data. The company has been building its own coding assistant, MetaCode, partly to reduce its dependence on outside tools — and partly because of the rising costs of that dependence.the-decoder

From Customer to Infrastructure Partner

The customer relationship is only one dimension. In July, the New York Times first reported that Meta and Anthropic were in preliminary talks for Meta to lease AI data center capacity to Anthropic in a deal worth up to $10 billion over two years. Anthropic initiated those discussions in June 2026. The arrangement would effectively transform Meta from a consumer of AI infrastructure into a seller of it, as CEO Zuckerberg has publicly expressed interest in monetizing the company's massive buildout.cryptobriefing+2

Meta has raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to between $130 billion and $145 billion, nearly double what it spent in 2025. The potential Anthropic lease would help offset that spending while giving Anthropic access to additional computing resources as it prepares for a potential public listing.reuters+1

An Uncomfortable Symbiosis

Neither company has commented publicly on the depth of their financial relationship. The dynamic reveals a pattern common in the AI industry: companies that compete fiercely in public while relying on each other in private. As Zuckerberg argues that concentrated AI power threatens individual freedom, his company is simultaneously funding one of the entities he warns against — and exploring ways to profit from its growth.nytimes