Elon Musk declares Anthropic the current AI leader, reversing earlier criticism

Elon Musk posted on X on July 9, 2026 acknowledging that his earlier assessment of Anthropic was wrong. He wrote, “I was clearly wrong about Anthropic. They are obviously currently the leader in AI,” and praised the company’s Mythos and Fable models as unmatched by any competitor.

Musk also said he would not cut off the compute resources Anthropic rents from his SpaceX‑AI (now xAI) operation, adding that harming a rival “is not my style.” The comment follows a May 2026 compute‑lease agreement in which Anthropic pays for access to xAI’s Colossus 1 data centre, housing about 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, recently raised $65 billion, pushing its valuation to roughly $965 billion, and has filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO. Musk’s reversal comes just weeks after the filing and highlights the company’s rapid rise in the artificial‑intelligence race.