SpaceX Partners With Anthropic as Elon Musk Battles OpenAI in Court

Anthropic has announced a compute deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in a major move for the AI firm. This partnership comes as Musk battles OpenAI, another AI firm, in court for violating the terms of their founding agreement as it shifts from a nonprofit to a for-profit organization.

Anthropic’s Claude Announces Partnership With SpaceX

In an X post, Claude announced that they have agreed to a partnership with SpaceX that will substantially increase their compute capacity. Anthropic’s AI assistant noted that this, alongside other recent compute deals, means the AI firm will be able to increase its usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API.

As part of the agreement, Anthropic will be able to use all the compute capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center. This will give the AI firm over 300 megawatts of additional capacity to deploy within the month.

Anthropic’s co-founder, Tom Brown, also commented on the partnership, noting that they will ramp up Claude inference on Colossus in the next few days. “Grateful to be partnering with SpaceX here. We are going to need to move a lot of atoms in order to keep up with AI demand, and there’s nobody better at quickly moving atoms (on or off planet Earth),” he added.

Anthropic also announced that, effective today, it will doible Calude Code’s 5-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, and Team plans, remove the peak-hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max plans, and substantially raise its API rate limits for Opus models. The SpaceX Anthropic partnership comes amid Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI.

Musk has accused OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of deviating from the organization’s nonprofit agenda for commercial gain. The world’s richest man also argues that the organization’s executives unjustly profited from his $39 million donation.

More Compute Deals To Come

Musk stated in an X post that SpaceX will provide compute to AI companies that are “taking the right steps to ensure it is good for humanity.” He noted that they reserve the right to reclaim the compute if these companies’ AI engages in actions that harm humanity.

The world’s richest man also mentioned that they are doing their best to achieve a great future with “amazing abundance” for all. “We will make mistakes, as to err is human, but always take rapid action to address them,” he added.

Interestingly, while testifying in his lawsuit against OpenAI, Musk warned that AI could destroy humanity and that he doesn’t trust Sam Altman to build AI safely. “We don’t want to have a ‘Terminator’ outcome,” he said.

Meanwhile, the SpaceX Anthropic partnership comes as SpaceX eyes a public listing this year, having confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC. SpaceX acquired Musk’s AI firm xAI earlier this year.

The primary goal of the acquisition is to leverage space-based power to keep up with AI demand. This aligns with the Anthropic co-founder’s statement about moving a lot of atoms to keep up with the AI demand.