Anthropic signed a deal with SpaceX/xAI to access Colossus 1 - the largest AI supercomputer on Earth

In February Elon Musk posted that Anthropic’s Claude AI “hates Whites and Asians” and is “misanthropic and evil.” Yesterday Musk leased them his entire supercomputer.Colossus 1. Memphis, Tennessee. Over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs. 300 megawatts. Full exclusive access to Anthropic, deployable within the month. Musk personally vetted the deal after spending a week with senior Anthropic leadership and concluded that “no one set off my evil detector.” He then added a clause that has never appeared in a compute lease in the history of the technology industry: SpaceX reserves the right to reclaim the capacity if Claude “engages in actions that harm humanity.” A kill switch clause written into a data center contract. The landlord can evict the tenant if the tenant’s AI misbehaves & act naughty.Now hold what happened in the same week. While Anthropic announced the SpaceX partnership on Wednesday at its developer event in San Francisco, the Pentagon finalized separate agreements granting Microsoft, Google, xAI, and several other AI companies access to classified networks for testing and deployment. Anthropic was excluded from every one. The company the President ordered blacklisted, the company the Pentagon designated a national security threat, the company a federal appeals court declined to protect from that designation, is simultaneously locked out of every government AI contract and plugged into the private infrastructure of the man closest to the President.Musk is Anthropic’s compute landlord and the government’s AI partner in the same seven-day window. He is leasing capacity to the company the administration wants to destroy while signing deals with the administration trying to destroy it.The reason this happened is the only number that matters in frontier AI. Dario Amodei stated in early May that Anthropic projected 10x revenue growth and experienced 80x instead. The company that could not anticipate its own demand curve is now consuming compute from every entity on Earth that has it. Amazon, 5 gigawatts. Google and Broadcom, 5 gigawatts. Microsoft and NVIDIA, $30 billion. Fluidstack, $50 billion in American infrastructure. And now the full output of the supercluster Elon Musk built for Grok but was running at roughly 11 percent utilization because xAI moved training to Colossus 2 and had nothing left to do with the first one.The man who called you misanthropic and evil leased you his GPU cluster because you needed it more than he did and because compute scarcity in 2026 has become the force that overrides every other strategic consideration. Personal grudges, political alignment, competitive rivalry, active government hostility. None of it matters anymore when the binding constraint is watts. Musk compared the arrangement to SpaceX launching satellites for competitors. Fair terms. The rocket company does not ask the satellite what it believes. It asks whether it can pay for the ride.Within hours Anthropic doubled Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits, removed peak-hour throttling, and raised Opus API limits across every paid tier. The compute is not theoretical. It is already serving inference to the largest paying developer base in frontier AI. And buried in the same announcement, almost nobody noticed that Anthropic has expressed interest in partnering with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.The company that cannot get a single government contract is planning to put data centers in orbit with the company that put humans on Mars.