How Elon Musk Went from Calling Anthropic ‘Evil’ to Powering Its AI — and What It Means for the Industry

What the Sources Actually Confirm

1. Musk's Earlier Criticism Was Harsh — and Then He Did a Deal

Musk's attacks on Anthropic were personal and persistent. On February 12, 2026, after Anthropic closed a $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion post-money valuation, Musk accused the company's AI of hating Whites, Asians, heterosexuals, and men, calling it "misanthropic and evil" . He also claimed Anthropic was "destined to become the antithesis of its name" and that it hated Western civilization .

The about-face came swiftly. On May 6, 2026, SpaceX and Anthropic revealed a deal that gave Claude the full computational power of Colossus 1 — roughly 220,000 Nvidia GPUs . Musk told X he spent time with Anthropic's senior staff, conducted a "vibe check," and concluded that "no one set off my evil detector" .

Fortune summarized the cognitive dissonance perfectly: "Elon Musk called Anthropic 'evil' three months ago. Now he's taking $4 billion to become its landlord" .

2. No Evidence Musk Called Anthropic the 'Clear AI Leader'

The specific phrase "clear AI leader" attributed to Musk does not appear in any of the sourced reporting. What reporting does show is that Musk "praised their team" , but the "clear AI leader" formulation appears to be the original question's framing, not a verified Musk quote.

3. Key Developments That Explain the Shift

4. The Deeper Strategic Logic

The reversal is best understood as a raw compute-for-cash and compute-for-strategic-position play:

• Anthropic was desperately hungry for Nvidia H100-equivalent GPU clusters to train and run its frontier models. SpaceX had them — Colossus 1 contains ~220,000 Nvidia GPUs .
• Musk reportedly needed massive revenue for SpaceX. The deal is worth ~$4 billion .
• xAI was being dissolved and folded into SpaceX AI, reducing the competitive conflict with Anthropic .
• The deal includes "space development" components — Anthropic's AI for SpaceX's space programs , giving Musk strategic AI capability without having to build it himself.

In short, the AI arms race has a new currency: compute. And Musk decided that leasing his rival the world's biggest supercomputer was better than fighting it .