From DeepMind to Colossus: How AI’s biggest rivalries keep collapsing into deals

In January, Anthropic banned xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, from using its Claude models. The company says it discovered that xAI engineers had been running Claude through the coding tool Cursor to accelerate their own development, aviolation of Anthropic’s terms of service. In February, Musk fired back, calling the company “misanthropic and evil.” Musk declared on x then that it was “doomed to this fate when you chose your name,” a jab that doubled as a swipe at OpenAI, whose models are, mostly, well, closed.

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit and is now suing over its transition to a for-profit structure. By May, xAI and Anthropic announced a compute partnership: Anthropic would rent the entirety of xAI’s Colossus 1 data center, over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, after SpaceX absorbed xAI in a merger valued at $1.25 trillion and discovered it had more silicon than demand. SpaceX is also interested in building satellite based data infrastructure. The announcement also stated that Anthropic had “expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”

How did we get here? The full arc stretches back to 2010, when DeepMind was founded in London with a mission to “solve intelligence” and Musk was among its earliest investors. When Google acquired DeepMind in 2014, Musk lost his window into what he considered the most dangerous AI research on the planet. He helped launch OpenAI as a nonprofit counterweight the following year. That lab’s internal tensions over money and mission eventually drove Dario and Daniela Amodei to leave and found Anthropic in 2021. Musk, meanwhile, departed OpenAI’s board in 2018, called for a moratorium on AI development in 2023, founded xAI weeks later, built one of the largest GPU clusters ever assembled, and is now suing the company he co-founded in a trial playing out in an Oakland courtroom this month. The full timeline of how a dinner conversation about AI reaching Mars led to a $1.25 trillion merger, a federal lawsuit, and a data center rental agreement between nominal enemies runs below.