Anthropic Taps Musk-Linked Compute Despite His Criticism of Claude

SAN FRANCISCO — Anthropic is running its AI models on Nvidia supercomputer infrastructure linked to Elon Musk, despite Musk’s public criticism of Claude as “evil,” according to Yahoo Finance.

The arrangement is notable given Musk’s outspoken criticism of Anthropic’s flagship product. The xAI founder and Tesla CEO has called Claude “evil” in social media posts while building his own competing chatbot, Grok.

Yet the business reality of AI infrastructure appears to have overridden the personal rivalry. With demand for Nvidia’s advanced GPU clusters far outstripping supply, AI companies have limited options for securing the massive compute resources required to train and run frontier models. Musk’s xAI has invested heavily in assembling one of the world’s largest supercomputer clusters, creating infrastructure capacity that can be leased to outside parties.

The arrangement highlights what industry observers have described as the concentrated nature of AI compute infrastructure in the United States. Nvidia’s dominance in supplying the specialized chips that power AI workloads means that a handful of entities control access to the hardware pipeline, creating dependencies that cut across competitive lines.

Anthropic, which counts Amazon and Google as major investors, has been aggressively scaling its compute capacity as it races to develop more powerful versions of Claude. The company has raised billions of dollars in recent funding rounds, with a significant portion earmarked for the computing resources needed to train next-generation models.

Musk, meanwhile, has positioned xAI as a direct competitor in the AI race. His company launched the Grok chatbot and has built out a massive data center in Memphis, Tennessee, housing tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs. Musk has simultaneously maintained a combative public posture toward rival AI companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI — which he co-founded and later sued — and Google DeepMind.

Anthropic’s reliance on infrastructure linked to one of its most vocal critics reflects a broader dynamic in the AI industry: the companies building competing AI models often depend on the same limited pool of compute providers, chip manufacturers, and cloud platforms, creating a web of interdependencies beneath the surface-level competition.

Neither Anthropic nor xAI immediately responded to requests for comment on the arrangement, according to the Yahoo Finance report.