![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/09eecb851ebbff9e130d3911c9ea9d92ef-altman-screentime.rhorizontal.w1100.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
Nobody quite saw last week\u2019s deal between Anthropic and xAI coming, but as soon as it was announced, it was suddenly overdetermined. Of course Anthropic needed access to xAI\u2019s enormous gas-turbine-powered Colossus data center, given the rapid growth of token-hungry tools like Claude Code. Obviously the relatively uncompetitive and unpopular offerings from xAI made turning the company into a neo-cloud provider a smart choice for Elon Musk, whose main advantage in the AI race is his ability to attract capital and apply it to the increasingly physical problems of scaling \u2014\u00a0acquiring hardware, building data centers, getting them switched on \u2014 but who had nowhere to direct all those Nvidia GPUs and needed a new AI story for SpaceXAI, pre-IPO. Dario Amodei, the theory-minded essayist and Anthropic CEO with comparatively less experience in ignoring local regulations to quickly build enormous facilities, needed to stop his product from breaking down<\/a> on a weekly basis as it onboards new corporate customers. It just makes sense.<\/p>\n This is all true, but again, an Anthropic-xAI collab wasn\u2019t the sort of thing people were talking about two weeks ago and for plenty of good reasons. xAI might not be a clear frontier lab at the moment, but Musk still has ambitions for it to become a major player and ultimately beat Anthropic. While Anthropic will be using xAI\u2019s first major data-center project (Colossus) to meet its inference needs \u2014\u00a0that is, to serve its models, not to train them\u00a0\u2014 xAI will still be using the much larger<\/a> Colossus 2 for its own purposes. Anthropic, as compute-constrained as it may be, wasn\u2019t without options but surprisingly chose a deal with a company whose CEO Amodei has specifically identified<\/a> as someone with whom he has deep ideological differences regarding both AI development and politics in general. Anthropic is also seeking access to the data-center project most identified with pollution and disregard for the surrounding community at a moment of mounting backlash.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Musk has been pretty clear about his feelings toward Anthropic for a long time and especially recently:<\/p>\n Your AI hates Whites & Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals and men. <\/p>\n This is misanthropic and evil. Fix it. <\/p>\n Frankly, I don\u2019t think there is anything you can do to escape the inevitable irony of Anthropic ending up being Misanthropic. You were doomed to this fate when you\u2026<\/p>\n \u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 12, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n Then, last week, Musk wrote, \u201cI spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed.\u201d Sure.<\/p>\n Both of these men, in their own ways, claim to be building an epochal technology with a nonzero risk of destroying the world, and each has implied that he\u2019s the one best equipped to avoid such an outcome. One way to read their collaboration is as an admission that they\u2019re not quite as concerned as they say they are about things going Very Wrong with AI. One could also imagine our modern AI CEOs as so aligned in a general post-human mission<\/a> that they\u2019re willing to do anything to bring about the God of Artificial Superintelligence. As much as their mutual dislike and misaligned business interests make this a strange deal, though, toxic interpersonal dynamics<\/a> offer the clearest and best explanation for why it happened: As much as they don\u2019t trust one another, they trust OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman less.<\/p>\n Amodei left OpenAI to start Anthropic over differences with Altman. (\u201cThe problem with OpenAI is Sam himself,\u201d Amodei said in 2021.) Today, despite Anthropic\u2019s momentum, OpenAI remains competitive in the two ways that matter most: It has more users than anyone else through ChatGPT and has the other most credible coding product in Codex. It\u2019s also the company most responsible for Anthropic\u2019s inability to access more compute (Google is an established cloud company that designs its own AI chips). Anthropic knows that its current advantages over OpenAI are thin and potentially fleeting \u2014\u00a0the mood and comparative rankings in this are prone to rapid change \u2014 and Amodei, perhaps perceiving Musk as a less credible threat to his business than Altman in the medium term, could use some help.<\/p>\n As for Musk, the most useful background for this deal is probably his ongoing lawsuit<\/a> against Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, with whom he co-founded OpenAI a decade ago. Now, Musk claims to feel like a \u201cfool\u201d to have ever invested in Altman\u2019s \u201clong con\u201d to turn OpenAI into a for-profit company and that its leaders are currently \u201cbetraying their promise\u201d and that misaligned AI \u201ccould kill us all.\u201d However one assesses Elon Musk\u2019s level of concern for human beings who are not Elon Musk<\/a>, the outline of the story is enough to justify virtually any deal that might get in Altman\u2019s way: Musk helped start the emblematic firm of the current AI boom, in part to prevent Google from winning, but then, after trying to take control himself, got outmaneuvered and pushed out and hasn\u2019t been able to catch up using either Tesla or xAI.<\/p>\n Amodei believes he might have a chance to beat his old boss. Musk sees a chance to put more pressure on a nemesis whom he\u2019s trying to thwart in multiple other ways. Whatever differences they have about the development of AI, they\u2019re united in one goal: to make sure Sam Altman doesn\u2019t end with more power than he already has.<\/p>\n Sign Up for John Herrman column alerts<\/p>\n Get an email alert as soon as a new article publishes.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n