SpaceX has signed a new deal with Anthropic as Elon Musk sues competitor OpenAI over alleged mission setbacks.
Published May 6, 2026
Anthropic has reached a deal to leverage the computing resources of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, easing tensions with former critics and giving both companies a boost in the high-stakes race for artificial intelligence.
Under the agreement announced Wednesday, Anthropic will take full advantage of the computing power of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors and will give chatbot maker Claude 300 megawatts of new capacity within a month. This is enough electricity to power more than 300,000 homes. The company, led by Dario Amodei, is enhancing the capabilities of its AI assistants Claude Pro and Claude Max for its subscribers.
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The announcement came as Anthropic held a developer day to announce a new feature for the Claude AI system called “Dreaming.” This tool allows AI systems to review work between sessions, identify patterns, and update files that store user settings and other context.
Dreaming, available as a research preview, comes with software for managing agents or AI programs that perform tasks with little human involvement. Amodei previously warned that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level jobs in the next one to five years.
Boosted by additional capacity from the SpaceX deal and other similar recent agreements, Anthropic said it is doubling rate limits on Claude Code paid plans, eliminating peak usage caps on Pro and Max accounts, and significantly increasing the amount of requests developers can make to Claude Opus models.
The company said it is also interested in working with SpaceX to develop a multi-gigawatt space orbit data center. This is one of Musk’s key goals and a key driver of SpaceX’s initial public offering, as the effort is expected to be highly capital-intensive and technically difficult.
In a statement on X, Musk said he made the decision to lease computing power to Anthropic after spending time with leaders last week. He said he was impressed by Anthropic’s efforts to ensure that Claude AI is “beneficial to humanity.”
“No one set off my evil detector,” Musk wrote. Musk is in a legal battle with OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, for allegedly violating its mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity and remain a nonprofit organization.
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Last week, Musk claimed in court that Altman was trying to “steal his charity” by the end of 2022, which “turns out to be true.”
Musk, the co-founder of OpenAI, also claimed that without him, OpenAI would not exist. The world’s richest man said he founded OpenAI after a conversation with Google co-founder Larry Page that he felt was lacking in concerns about safety in AI.
“I said, ‘What if AI wipes out humanity?’ He said that’s fine as long as artificial intelligence survives. I said that’s insane, that’s just crazy. And he called me a ‘speciesist.’ Because I value humans more than AI. …The reason OpenAI exists is because Larry Page called me a “speciesist.” … What’s the opposite of Google? It’s an open source nonprofit. ”
OpenAI’s lawyers argued that Musk’s lawsuit is an attempt to undermine Altman’s company in favor of his xAI, which is now part of SpaceX.
Musk’s deal comes as President Donald Trump’s administration strikes new deals with other AI giants, with the exception of Anthropic.
On Tuesday, tech giants Microsoft, Google and Elon Musk’s xAI agreed to give the federal government access to test their new artificial intelligence tools amid hacking concerns surrounding Anthropic’s technology.
Last week, the Pentagon also announced contracts with 10 major AI companies to use their technology on classified networks. Anthropic was not included in that deal.
