{"id":476998,"date":"2026-05-09T23:01:24","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T23:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/476998\/"},"modified":"2026-05-09T23:01:24","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T23:01:24","slug":"anthropic-spacex-compute-deal-shows-how-tokens-are-taking-over-the-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/476998\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic-SpaceX compute deal shows how tokens are taking over the economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reed\u2019s view <\/p>\n

Elon Musk\u2019s decision to sell compute power<\/a> to Anthropic is an illustration of how the AI token is taking over the economy.<\/p>\n

When Elon Musk founded xAI (now owned by SpaceX) he rightly saw how AI compute power would become a scarce and valuable resource, and built his Colossus data center at a mind-boggling pace. But in uncharacteristic fashion for Musk, xAI moved too slowly into harness engineering, which allows AI models to reach out beyond chat windows and control more operations on a computer.<\/p>\n

Harnesses enabled an explosion in agentic AI use. Products like OpenClaw, Anthropic\u2019s Claude Cowork, and OpenAI\u2019s Codex app ushered in a whole new way of leveraging AI models, and meaningfully increased the amount of tokens they consumed. The technology more than surpassed Anthropic\u2019s ability to keep up with compute and showed just how much Anthropic underestimated its own success.<\/p>\n

But this isn\u2019t just a story of two companies making a deal to rectify strategic mistakes. It\u2019s a monumental example of the new form of commercialism that has taken over the AI era: A currency that can be transferred anywhere in the world at nearly the speed of light. A utility so important it\u2019s already drawing comparisons to oil.<\/p>\n

For example, if The Gap orders too many clothes and Uniqlo doesn\u2019t order enough, Gap can\u2019t just sell its clothes at Uniqlo stores. But in the AI world, the general purpose nature of AI tokens now makes that kind of trade possible.<\/p>\n

At some point in the future, raw token production will be a low margin business. xAI will want to sell its own tools and not just the GPUs that power them. But for now, demand is growing at such a rapid pace that it almost doesn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n

Room for Disagreement <\/p>\n

In a recent blog post, British programmer Simon Willison cites a post on X<\/a> by Musk, where he writes that his company reserves the right to withdraw from the deal if Anthropic\u2019s AI engages in activity that\u2019s harmful to humanity. \u201cPresumably the criteria for \u2018harm humanity\u2019 are decided by Elon<\/a> himself,\u201d Willison writes. \u201cSounds like a new form of supply chain risk for Anthropic to me!\u201d<\/p>\n

Notable <\/p>\n