Anthropic weighs Musk deal as $40 billion compute stake grows

Elon Musk brushed off suggestions that he could cut Anthropic off from SpaceX servers, even as a reported compute deal with xAI would send about $40 billion in revenue to his company through May 2029. The exchange underscored how much leverage now sits with the operators of AI infrastructure, not just the labs building the models.

Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on June 9, then saw the U.S. government order access suspended on June 12 under export-control authority. Anthropic said the directive applied to all foreign nationals, including foreign-national employees, and tied the move to national-security concerns, including cybersecurity risk and a reported jailbreak concern. The company later said the export controls had been lifted and that Fable 5 would return globally on July 1.

Anthropic has described Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as the same underlying model, with Fable 5 carrying stronger safeguards for general use. Mythos 5 was initially limited to a small set of trusted defensive-cybersecurity partners. In its launch materials, Anthropic priced both models at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, and said Fable 5 was available through the Claude platform as well as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Foundry.

The infrastructure side of the business is becoming just as consequential as the models themselves. Anthropic agreed in May to buy 300 megawatts of compute from xAI’s Colossus 1 data center near Memphis, Tennessee, a commitment valued at about $1.25 billion a month through May 2029. Google separately signed an infrastructure-rental deal worth $920 million per month through June 2029, showing how concentrated and expensive the market for advanced compute has become.

Anthropic has also tried to frame its own safety work as part of the answer. The company says it extensively tests and evaluates its models and recently proposed an industry-wide framework for scoring jailbreak severity with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other Glasswing partners. That push for shared standards lands in a market where access can be interrupted by policy decisions, safety escalations or commercial disputes, and where even the biggest model makers depend on hosts they do not fully control.