Earlier this month, xAI signed a major computing deal with Anthropic, committing billions of dollars per month for exclusive use of the company’s Colossus cluster. It was a coup for both companies, giving xAI some much-needed revenue and helping Anthropic catch up in the never-ending race for computing.
But this morning in XElon Musk downplayed exactly how much SpaceX had committed to the deal.
“SpaceX hasn’t committed to leasing Colossus in years, although it’s possible that will happen,” he said, replying to one user. “It’s a 180-day lease with 90 days’ mutual cancellation notice. The short term was our request, not Anthropic’s. We won’t leave them hanging and provide an off-ramp logic, but if the calculation gets super tight, I said we might need it back at some point.”
Musk’s statement directly contradicts SpaceX’s recent S-1 filingwhich confirms the standard 90-day cancellation but presents the deal as a three-year deal. Page F-62 of the deposition states:
On May 3, 2026, the Company entered into a cloud services agreement with Anthropic PBC, a non-profit artificial intelligence research and development company, regarding access to computing capacity. Under this agreement, the customer has agreed to pay a monthly fee until May 2029, with capacity ramping up in May 2026 at a reduced fee. The agreement may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice. Customer will retain ownership and intellectual property rights in its content, AI models and related data.
The key point here is that Anthropic has “agreed to pay a monthly fee through May 2029” — a fairly straightforward description of a three-year lease. The same language is repeated in the F-96 and in slightly different form (“the client has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029”) on pages 13 and 146, so it’s not like there was a typo.
xAI did not respond to a request for clarification.
Perhaps we can debate whether Anthropic agreeing to pay for a service means the same thing as SpaceX agreeing to provide that service, but it usually doesn’t mean that “lease”. And why have a one-way lock if either party can terminate the agreement with three months’ notice anyway?
I don’t have the agreement in front of me, so I don’t know what it says — and neither do I SpaceX nor Humane mention anything about the duration of the deal in their announcements. However, there should be a fairly clear fact here, and it’s not the kind of thing you want to misrepresent during a company’s quiet period.
As always, we should note that the SEC probably won’t do anything — and even if they did, Elon probably wouldn’t care. But this kind of shows a material misrepresentation made in marketing a securitywhich is bad karma to say the least.
Sean O’Kane contributed reporting to this article.
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