Anthropic is paying Musk $40 billion to rent his computers and he can reportedly pull the plug if Claude 'harms humanity'
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Anthropic is paying Musk $40 billion to rent his computers and he can reportedly pull the plug if Claude 'harms humanity'")
Anthropic is paying Musk $40 billion to rent his computers and he can reportedly pull the plug if Claude 'harms humanity' Photograph: (AFP)
Anthropic has agreed to pay Elon Musk's xAI/SpaceX $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 — more than $40 billion in total — for full access to the Colossus 1 data centre. Multiple reports describe a clause letting SpaceX reclaim the compute if Anthropic's models are found to harm humanity, though the exact contractual status hasn't been jointly confirmed by either company.
Anthropic has built its entire public identity around being the safety-conscious alternative to Silicon Valley's move-fast AI labs. It now depends, financially, on Elon Musk to keep running.
The Deal
Anthropic has agreed to pay xAI/SpaceX roughly $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for full access to Colossus 1, the data centre in Memphis that Musk's companies built out for AI training. The deal gives Anthropic all of Colossus 1's capacity — more than 220,000 Nvidia processors, drawing 300 megawatts of power. Over the full term, the arrangement is worth more than $40 billion.
Musk's own xAI keeps the larger Colossus 2 facility for its own model training, meaning Anthropic isn't sharing capacity with Grok's development — it has exclusive use of a separate, still-massive facility Musk built.
The added compute has already had a visible effect on Anthropic's own products: the company says it has let it double Claude Code's usage limits and lift peak-hour caps for paying users.
The Clause That's Drawing Attention
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What has generated the most industry discussion isn't the price tag — it's a reported clause in the arrangement that would let SpaceX reclaim the compute if Anthropic's models are found to engage in actions that harm humanity. The exact contractual wording and status of this clause hasn't been jointly confirmed by Anthropic or SpaceX, but it has been widely reported and treated as a genuine, novel form of supply-chain risk unique to this deal: Anthropic's own safety commitments are now, at least in theory, enforceable by a competitor's infrastructure contract rather than only by Anthropic's own governance.
Musk's Own Words
The optics are stranger given Musk's history with Anthropic. He has previously called the company ‘woke,’ ‘misanthropic,’ and ‘evil.’ After the compute deal closed, his tone shifted publicly: ‘Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about doing the right thing,’ he posted on X. ‘No one set off my evil detector.’
Why Anthropic Made This Deal At All
The arrangement makes more sense as infrastructure math than as a friendship. Frontier AI labs are compute-constrained across the board, and Colossus 1 represented available, already-built capacity at a moment when data centre construction timelines are the binding constraint on how fast any lab can train and serve its next model. Anthropic needed the GPUs faster than it could build or lease them elsewhere — and Musk had them.
It leaves Anthropic in an unusual position for a company whose entire market positioning rests on being the more cautious, more safety-focused lab: a meaningful share of the infrastructure behind that positioning now runs through a deal with the AI industry's most publicly unpredictable rival.
