How xAI Went From Chasing Anthropic to Powering It

SpaceX’s AI lab has had a chaotic year so far, churning through leaders and staff before bringing in outside help in an effort to catch up to Anthropic in coding.

What isn’t widely known, however, is that xAI has played a long-running cat-and-mouse game with Anthropic as it has sought to tap into that lab’s technology to develop its own offerings—even after Anthropic cut off access, six people involved with the work said. That tense relationship sheds new light on xAI’s decision to rent out some of its coveted compute capacity—to Anthropic.