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Elon Musk once called Anthropic “evil” for building AI he claimed was politically and demographically biased. Three months later, he agreed to give the company access to 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.
The deal was disclosed on May 6 as Musk was in court suing OpenAI – the company he co-founded and once set out to build responsible AI with.
Make it make sense.
But this is how AI works now. The people shaping it – and, by extension, some part of our future – are still just that: people. They act in their own interests, form alliances when it suits them, and break these partnerships just as quickly.
Image credit: rudall30 / Shutterstock
For Anthropic, the upside of the deal was immediate. It handed the firm a surge in compute, enough to double Claude Code’s rate limits almost overnight.
Speaking of Anthropic, its Claude Mythos model has sent regulators scrambling across Asia. Central banks from South Korea to Singapore have been urgently briefing member banks after the model showed it could rapidly find and exploit previously unknown security flaws. My colleague Elyssa has more in her latest story.
For SpaceX, securing a marquee customer like Anthropic for its AI infrastructure push could help shore up investor confidence ahead of a planned IPO – not least because the company has plenty of idle GPUs to put to work anyway.
Friends and enemies don’t stay fixed for long. In tech, they shift depending on the incentives.
In my latest report, I detailed how Southeast Asia’s medical AI scribe startups – which offer tools to automate documentation of patient conversations – are dealing with that in real time. For now, they partner with electronic medical record providers to get into hospitals quickly. But those same partners could build their own tools and cut them out.
In AI, it seems survival means playing both sides, or, if possible, every side while you can.
Glenn Kaonang, journalist
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