Nobody quite saw last week’s deal between Anthropic and xAI coming, but as soon as it was announced, it was suddenly overdetermined. Of course Anthropic needed access to xAI’s 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 — acquiring hardware, building data centers, getting them switched on — 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 on a weekly basis as it onboards new corporate customers. It just makes sense.

This is all true, but again, an Anthropic-xAI collab wasn’t 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’s first major data-center project (Colossus) to meet its inference needs — that is, to serve its models, not to train them — xAI will still be using........

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