From DeepMind to Colossus: How AI’s biggest rivalries keep collapsing into deals
From DeepMind to Colossus: How AI’s biggest rivalries keep collapsing into deals
Publish Date: 2026-05-08 17:19:00
Source Domain: www.rdworldonline.com
- In January, Anthropic banned xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, from using its Claude models after discovering xAI engineers used Cursor to violate terms of service.
- Musk responded in February, criticizing Anthropic as “misanthropic and evil,” and referenced a failed attempt to maintain an open AI initiative with his name.
- In May, xAI and Anthropic announced a compute partnership wherein Anthropic would rent xAI’s Colossus 1 data center with 220,000 GPUs after SpaceX’s merger with xAI.
- This computational arrangement followed Musk’s departure from and lawsuit against his co-founded organization, OpenAI, and his subsequent founding of xAI.
- The complex dynamic between these entities stems from Musk’s initial investment and involvement with DeepMind, which inspired him to also found the nonprofit OpenAI as a counterbalance while he lost direct access to DeepMind after Google acquired it.
- Internal conflicts at OpenAI ultimately led to the departure of key engineers Dario and Daniela Amodei, who founded Anthropic in 2021, further complicating their relationship with xAI.
