Musk publicly reverses on Anthropic — 'I was clearly wrong' — while sitting on a $40B compute contract

TechCrunch·high signal

On July 9, Elon Musk wrote that he was 'clearly wrong' about Anthropic, calling it 'obviously currently the leader in AI' and saying no company has shipped a model as good as Mythos/Fable. This reverses his September 2025 claim that 'winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic.' The context is structural, not rhetorical: Anthropic pays roughly $1.25B/month through May 2029 — about $40B — for the entire 300MW output of xAI's Colossus 1 near Memphis, and Musk separately pledged never to cut off that access. Google reportedly rents SpaceX infrastructure at $920M/month through June 2029.