Elon Musk, the man who once called Anthropic “missanthropic” and “hypocritical,” now says the company is the best in the business. In a post on X on July 9, Musk wrote that he was “clearly wrong about Anthropic” and that “they are obviously currently the leader in AI.”
This is the same Musk who, just four months ago, predicted Anthropic would fail in the AI landscape. Musk’s specific praise centered on Anthropic’s Mythos and Fable AI models, which he indicated were unmatched by competitors.
In May 2026, Anthropic signed a short-term compute lease, 180 days with extension options, at xAI’s Colossus 1 data center. That facility houses 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, making it one of the largest AI training clusters on the planet. In other words, Anthropic is literally paying Musk’s company for the computing power to build the models he’s now calling best-in-class.
Anthropic’s meteoric rise by the numbers
The company raised $65 billion in May 2026, pushing its valuation to a staggering $965 billion. Anthropic confidentially filed for a US IPO around June 1, 2026. The timing of Musk’s praise, coming roughly five weeks after that filing, is worth noting.
