Anthropic’s new, powerful allies: Elon Musk and SpaceX

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**Stephanie Hughes** (0:31)
When an AI company and a rocket company get together. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.
It's Friday, time for Marketplace Tech Bytes. This week, Apple pays $250 million over exaggerated AI capabilities. Plus, GameStop wants to buy eBay. But first, Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, announced a new computing deal this week with SpaceX and its AI division, XAI.
Anthropic will get access to SpaceX's Colossus One data center. This will let the company increase how much its customers can use Claude.
The deal comes as one of the leaders of SpaceX, Elon Musk, is facing off in federal court against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. I spoke about all this with Caroline O'Donovan, a senior tech reporter at the San Francisco Standard. She said that Anthropic's leaders talked about the need for more computing power at their developer conference this week.

**Caroline O'Donovan** (1:35)
The CEO, Dario Almoday, was on stage and he was talking about, over the last year, we know that we've had blackouts, we've had service issues, it's because we grew faster than they were intending to, and the problem is compute. The obvious problem that this solves for Anthropic is compute. The surprising thing is that over the last weeks and months, Anthropic has really positioned itself as the company most concerned with the future of humanity and societal values. I think that made it eyebrow raising that they're now deciding to get their compute from Elon Musk.

**Stephanie Hughes** (2:08)
Yeah. Let's talk about that a little bit. This deal is happening in a week where, as you talked about, one of SpaceX's leaders, is in the middle of a trial against OpenAI. I know you've been at that trial. With that in mind, what did you think when you first heard about this deal?

**Caroline O'Donovan** (2:22)
I was very surprised. I mean, for the reason I just mentioned, it just seems like odd bedfellows. Anthropic is OpenAI's biggest competitor. Musk is in the middle of this trial that he brought, a case that he's bringing, which everyone is questioning, why did he put himself in this position? It seems like not necessarily meant to gain him anything as much as to punish OpenAI.
Then in the midst of that trial, he seals this incredible surprising deal with Anthropic, which is their biggest competitor. You saw a lot of people saying, wow, this is a huge rude gesture towards Sam Altman. Something I think I noted that I thought was really interesting is that Musk himself seemed to say that he had come to the decision to make this deal after spending time with executives at Anthropic this week, which made someone who was in the room with him for a lot of last week, I was like, is that where he went when the judge dismissed the trial for the day?

**Stephanie Hughes** (3:15)
Where was he going? Do you have any other thoughts on why SpaceX, which has its own AI division, now SpaceX AI, decided to lend its computing power to a competitor?

**Caroline O'Donovan** (3:27)
One thing I would like to prod a little bit more this weekend, maybe into next is I saw a few people saying, well, does this mean that Grok is dead? Does this mean that XAI is dead? Does that mean that Elon and whatever his menagerie of companies are no longer trying to build a competing AI model because they're selling their compute to a competitor instead? But during the trial this week, Elon actually was asked on the stand whether Grok was a competitor for ChatGPT and he said under oath that it's catching up.
It didn't make it seem like it was a product he's not working on anymore.

**Stephanie Hughes** (4:01)
We'll be right back.
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