Anthropic’s new, powerful allies: Elon Musk and SpaceX
Marketplace Tech
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
On this week’s “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review,” we’ll discuss why Apple is paying a $250 million settlement over its Apple Intelligence tool and its capabilities. Plus, GameStop makes a surprising buyout offer for eBay. But first up: Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, announced a new computing deal this week with SpaceX and its AI division, xAI. Anthropic will get access to SpaceX’s Colossus One data center, which will let the company increase how much its customers can use Claude. The deal comes as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is facing off in federal court against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman.
Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke about all this with Caroline O’Donovan, AI and technology senior reporter at The San Francisco Standard, who noted that Anthropic's leaders talked about the need for more computing power at their developer conference this week.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When an AI company and a rocket company get together. |
| 0:05.5 | From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. |
| 0:08.2 | I'm Stephanie Hughes. |
| 0:18.3 | It's Friday, time for Marketplace Techbytes. |
| 0:21.6 | This week, Apple pays $250 million over exaggerated AI capabilities. |
| 0:27.6 | Plus, GameStop wants to buy eBay. |
| 0:30.4 | But first, Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, announced a new computing deal this week with SpaceX and its AI division, XAI. Anthropic will get |
| 0:39.2 | access to SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center. This will let the company increase how much its customers |
| 0:44.5 | can use Claude. The deal comes as one of the leaders of SpaceX, Elon Musk, is facing off in federal |
| 0:50.6 | court against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. I spoke about all this with |
| 0:55.4 | Caroline O'Donovan, a senior tech reporter at the San Francisco Standard. She said that |
| 1:00.2 | Anthropics leaders talked about the need for more computing power at their developer conference |
| 1:04.1 | this week. The CEO, Dario O'Madee, was on stage and he was talking about, you know, over the |
| 1:09.3 | last year, we know that we've had blackouts, we've had service issues, it's because we grew faster than they were intending |
| 1:14.5 | to and the problem is compute. And so the obvious problem that this solves for Anthropic is |
| 1:19.3 | compute. The surprising thing is that over the last, you know, weeks and months, Anthropic has really |
| 1:25.1 | positioned itself, right, as the company most concerned |
| 1:28.5 | with the future of humanity and, you know, societal values. And I think that made it sort of eyebrow |
| 1:34.1 | raising that they're now deciding to get their compute from Elon Musk. Yeah, let's talk about |
| 1:39.1 | that a little bit. You know, this deal is happening in a week where, as you talked about, one of |
| 1:42.8 | SpaceX's leaders, it's in the middle of a trial against Open AI. I know you've been at that trial. With that in mind, what did you think when you first heard about this deal? I was very surprised. I mean, for the reason I just mentioned, it just seems like odd bedfellows. Anthropic is Open AI's biggest competitor. Musk is in the middle of this trial that he brought, a case that he's bringing, which everyone |
| 2:03.6 | is sort of questioning, you know, why did he put himself in this position? |
... |
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