We’re feeling cynical about xAI’s big deal with Anthropic

Anthropic and xAI announced a big partnership this week, with Anthropic buying all the compute capacity at xAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Tennessee.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed what the deal might mean for xAI’s parent company SpaceX, as SpaceX prepares to go public and apparently plans to dissolve xAI as a separate organization.

Kirsten did her best to offer “a positive view” on the partnership — after all, it’s a new way for xAI to make money. But she also noted that this also suggests xAI isn’t doing much when it comes to training its own frontier AI models, and it’s harder for the company to position itself as a “forward-looking, innovative” business when that’s the case.

Then Sean asked: “Why be positive when you can be cynical?” In his view, this seems like “a major heat...

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