Earlier this month, xAI signed a massive computing deal with Anthropic, pledging billions of dollars each month for exclusive use of the company’s Colossus cluster. This was a coup for both companies, delivering much-needed revenue to xAI and helping Anthropic catch up in the never-ending computing race.
But this morning on X, Elon Musk downplayed exactly how committed SpaceX was to this deal.
“SpaceX hasn’t committed to leasing Colossus for years, but it could happen,” he said in a response to a user. “It’s a 180-day lease, after which we mutually cancel with 90 days’ notice. Short-term is our requirement, not Anthropic’s. We don’t leave them hanging, and we offer a reasonable off-ramp, but we said if compute gets really tight we might need to bring them back at some point.”
Musk’s statement directly contradicts SpaceX’s recent S-1 filing, which presents the contract as a three-year agreement while confirming the standard 90-day cancellation. Page F-62 of the submission says:
On May 3, 2026, we entered into a cloud services agreement with Anthropic PBC, an AI research and development public interest corporation, for access to computing capacity. Pursuant to the agreement, customers agreed to pay monthly fees through May 2029 and receive increased capacity at a reduced rate in May 2026. This Agreement may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice. You retain ownership and intellectual property rights in your content, AI models, and related data.
The important point here is that Anthropic has “agreed to pay monthly fees through May 2029.” This is a very simple explanation of a 3 year lease. The same wording is repeated in a slightly different form on pages 13 and 146 on F-96 (“Customer agreed to pay $1.25 billion monthly through May 2029”), so there’s no typo.
xAI did not respond to requests for clarification.
Perhaps one could debate whether Anthropic agreeing to pay for a service means the same thing as SpaceX agreeing to provide that service, but that generally doesn’t mean a “lease.” In any case, why would a unilateral lock-in be necessary when either party can terminate the deal with three months’ notice?
I don’t have this contract in front of me, so I don’t know what it says. And neither SpaceX nor Anthropic said anything about the length of the deal in their announcements. Still, there should be some pretty clear facts on this issue here, and it’s not the kind of thing a company wants to make false statements about during a period of silence.
As always, it should be noted that the SEC probably won’t do anything, and even if they did, Elon probably wouldn’t care. However, this kind of behavior looks like a material misrepresentation made during the marketing of a security, which is bad karma at the very least.
Sean O’Kane contributed reporting to this article.
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