Elon Musk isn’t just feuding with OpenAI, but he doesn’t seem to hold another big player in the AI space in particularly high regard either.
Elon Musk has said that it was never possible for Anthropic, which competes with his own xAI, to win the AI race. “Anthropic is going to lose :/” X user Yacine, who previously worked at xAI, had posted. In response, Musk said: “Winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic.”
It’s an interesting statement, given how Anthropic is now worth $183 billion, around the same valuation as xAI. Anthropic’s products are especially popular among coders, and Claude Code is one of the most popular AI coding agents around. Anthropic also now has an annualized revenue of $500 billion, which makes it one of the fastest growing tech companies of all time.
But Elon Musk seems to believe that Anthropic will not ultimately win the AI race. This could be because Musk believes that given how Anthropic doesn’t have its own datacenters — it relies on Amazon’s AWS for its hardware needs — it wouldn’t be able to compete with companies that have their own datacenter stack. Google and xAI already have their own datacenters, while OpenAI is rapidly building its own. Also, while Anthropic has plenty of adoption within the developer community, this audience might not end up being as loyal as casual users — OpenAI is now the fifth most-visited website in the world, and ChatGPT has become synonymous with AI in some circles. While developers could switch to a more capable or cheaper model, it’s unlikely that casual users will switch away from ChatGPT particularly easily.
Musk though seems to believe that Anthropic will not end up winning the AI race. It’s not likely that Anthropic will end up going to zero, so Musk seems to be implying that Anthropic will end up being acquired by a bigger player. Amazon and Google already have large stakes in Anthropic — Amazon, in particular, doesn’t have a big AI play of its own, and could want to have Anthropic in its corner. Of course, Anthropic could end up succeeding big as well — if its coding models find more adoption, it could end up even going past OpenAI in terms of revenue with its paying enterprise users. It remains to be seen how Anthropic shapes up, but Elon Musk at least doesn’t seem to believe it’s a serious player in the AI race.