Elon Musk, Kingmaker

The AI race has been tilted in favor of Anthropic

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An extra article about an interesting recent development: Anthropic x SpaceX.

I. AN UNLIKELY ALLIANCE

In game theory, the kingmaker is a player who can’t win but retains enough power to determine who does. Elon Musk aspired to be king when he founded OpenAI. He aspired to be king when he founded xAI. But after Sam Altman betrayed him—for which they are immersed in an ongoing legal battle—and after Grok fell behind the frontier models, he realized he’d have to settle.

On Wednesday, Anthropic announced a deal to use all of the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. More than 300 megawatts, over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, destined to “directly improve capacity” for Claude Pro and Max subscribers. Effective immediately: 2x Claude Code rate limits for every paid tier, no peak-hour throttling for Pro and Max subs, and “considerably” higher API rate limits on Opus models, up to 1,500%.

The same Elon Musk who wrote in February that Anthropic “hates Western civilization,” dubbed the company “MisAnthropic,” and predicted that “winning was never in the set of outcomes” for them, spent last week with senior members of Anthropic’s team and came out impressed by their integrity, competence, and care: “No one set off my evil detector. So long as they engage in critical self-examination, Claude will probably be good.” I guess Anthropic can shrug the whiplash off as “strong opinions, weakly held,” as Musk’s colleague Marc Andreessen would say.

There’s one thing Musk doesn’t hold weakly, though: He hates Sam Altman. So much so that he’d rather help a competitor that inhabits his ideological antipodes than let Altman win.

But don’t mistake a revenge factor with this being a visceral decision. Musk added a caveat that frames this less as a coronation than a golden leash: he reserves the right to “reclaim the compute” if Claude engages in actions that are risky for the world. What those actions are is for him to claim. Besides, neither in game theory nor in the real world do kingmakers abdicate the throne out of kindness: it’s just a good business to have a few hundred thousand GPUs to spare when the entire AI industry suffers from a compute bottleneck.

To understand why it’s so newsworthy that SpaceX is allowing Anthropic to run Claude on Colossus 1 when this kind of partnership is extremely common—and beyond the rivalry with Altman—you need to understand, first, how precious computing power is right now, and, second, how costly it is to sell a popular compute-intensive product when you can’t meet demand. It will define the AI industry this year.

II. EVERYTHING IS COMPUTER

Compute is the scarcest and most important resource in AI for several reasons.