Musk and Anthropic are going to space to find electricity

Original by Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author: Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Musk and Anthropic have actually joined forces!

In the early hours of May 7, Beijing time, a joint announcement by Anthropic and SpaceX instantly stunned the entire AI community. According to the announcement, the two parties have signed a cooperation agreement, where Anthropic will utilize the full compute capacity of SpaceX's Colossus1 data center, providing Anthropic with over 300 megawatts of new compute power (equivalent to more than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs) within a month, directly improving the user experience for Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers.

This marks the first time Musk's business empire has reached such a direct, formal, and large-scale cooperation with Anthropic. For years, Anthropic's core partners have been Amazon and Google. Whether in cloud infrastructure, chip supply, or model training, Anthropic has long been deeply tied to the AWS and Google TPU ecosystems. Musk has never publicly invested in Anthropic and has even publicly criticized its AI safety approach and political leanings multiple times. There were virtually no records of public infrastructure collaborations, model partnerships, or business alliances between the two sides prior to this.

When the most capable large language model company finally connects with the world's most talked-about richest man, such cooperation naturally carries its own buzz factor.

Musk's Underlying Intentions

For Musk, the timing of this collaboration adds a layer of subtlety.

Just ten days ago (April 27), Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI entered the trial phase in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In recent court sessions, both sides have been trading barbs, creating an atmosphere thick with hostility. This lawsuit, viewed externally as the "first major case of the AI era," has essentially brought Musk's long-standing feud with OpenAI into full public view.

And Anthropic happens to be one of OpenAI's most direct and core competitors. Thus, this cooperation naturally takes on an intriguing dimension — the enemy of my enemy is my friend; if it hurts OpenAI, Musk is willing to try anything.

Looking deeper from the perspective of the AI competitive landscape, this collaboration also signals an evolution in Musk's strategic thinking in the AI era.

On the surface, this is a standard compute transaction — SpaceX provides GPU clusters, Anthropic gains more inference resources, and both sides benefit. But things are clearly not that simple.

Because what Musk is doing around AI today goes far beyond simply "building a model." Over the past two years, since Musk personally launched xAI (now renamed SpaceXAI), the outside world has largely viewed large model companies like OpenAI and Anthropic as Musk's potential competitors. However, with the construction and operational launch of the Colossus supercomputing cluster, its data center capacity has begun to exceed internal needs, subtly shifting Musk's role.

Today, Musk increasingly resembles an "arms dealer" in the AI world — anyone who needs compute power can come to him, even if they were once potential competitors.

Anthropic, Caught in the 'Degradation' Storm, Finally Gets Its Savior

For Anthropic, the significance of this collaboration may be even greater than outsiders imagine.

Over the past few months, Claude's reputation has been undergoing subtle changes. On one hand, Claude Opus 4.7 and the mysterious Mythos are still regarded as some of the best models on the market; on the other hand, voices complaining about Claude's "intelligence degradation" have become increasingly frequent within the community.

This sentiment is particularly strong among heavy developers. Some have noticed that Claude's reasoning ability shows a "cliff-like decline" when handling long code or complex engineering tasks. Some research reports indicate that the "thinking budget" or response length for certain Claude models has been significantly cut. More retail users have reported that Claude's hallucinations are becoming more severe, making it more prone to producing "convincing nonsense" when processing complex information.

Following the "degradation" controversy, Anthropic's official team published a technical post-mortem, acknowledging that due to product-level adjustments and bugs between March and April, Claude models experienced "performance degradation" on complex tasks.

However, this explanation failed to convince the market. Public opinion still widely believes that high inference costs and compute shortages are the main reasons behind the performance fluctuations of major models like Claude in real-world applications.

The stronger the model's capability, the higher the inference cost; the larger the user base, the more terrifying the GPU consumption. All AI companies face an unavoidable commercial contradiction — users want models running at "full strength" forever, but companies must control costs. Thus, mechanisms like dynamic throttling, inference budget adjustments, response length control, and priority scheduling inevitably emerge, and the user's ultimate perception is that "the model has gotten dumber."

This is precisely why the SpaceX compute collaboration is so critical for Anthropic.

In its announcement, Anthropic stated that with the deal, the experience for core Claude users would be directly improved:

• First, Anthropic will double the five-hour usage limits for Claude Code on Pro, Max, Team, and per-seat Enterprise plans.
• Second, Anthropic will remove peak-hour throttling for Claude Code on Pro and Max accounts.
• Third, Anthropic will significantly increase the API rate limits for the Claude Opus model.

Alex Finn, a leading AI model evaluator, commented on this cooperation, stating, Anthropic has been losing steam over the past few months — quotas reduced, models getting dumber... and now Musk comes to the rescue, offering Anthropic access to the world's largest supercomputing cluster. Anthropic's compute crisis has long been the company's Achilles' heel, causing a steady decline in user sentiment and market confidence. Musk solved this problem with a single deal.

Alex Finn used an analogy more familiar to American sports fans: "Musk's help is essentially like giving Anthropic the equivalent of getting Victor Wembanyama!"

The Final Frontier — Finding Power in Space

In the cooperation announcement, there was a line many overlooked — "The parties are also interested in collaborating to develop multi-gigawatt-scale orbital AI compute power." Put simply, Musk and Anthropic want to move AI data centers into space. It sounds like science fiction, but the issue it reflects is very real.

Aakash Gupta, a highly influential analyst in the AI field, explained this: "Earth's power, land, and cooling capacity can no longer keep up with demand quickly enough."

Anthropic has already secured approximately 15 gigawatts of compute capacity, equivalent to the power consumption of 11 million households, yet it's still not enough... Nvidia can produce chips, and Anthropic has ample funds, but what cannot be produced on time are the power, land, and cooling capacity — and the rate of model demand growth has far outpaced the construction speed of these fundamental infrastructures.

The frontier of the compute race has now begun to break through Earth's boundaries. And only one company in the world truly has the capability to launch gigawatt-scale solar arrays into orbit on a large scale — SpaceX.

If this interstellary-type story eventually becomes reality, the only person who could pull it off might be Musk.