So you can put Anthropic on your list of companies that like to talk big about safety, but when the rubber hits the road, profits matter more than safety.
"The company began operations at its first site, Colossus 1, in June of 2024 and used as many as 35 unpermitted gas turbines to power the facility. Despite receiving intense public pushback over the use of illegal turbines and the lack of public input and transparency around Colossus 1, xAI officials said it planned on “copying and pasting” its unlawful turbine strategy to power Colossus 2."
"xAI removed its unpermitted turbines at the Colossus 1 data center after SELC, on behalf of the NAACP, sent a notice of intent to sue under the Clean Air Act. The company obtained permits for its remaining 15 turbines."
[0] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
Not sure how much it hurts then compared to blocking openclaw though.
sources: https://www.tba.org/?pg=Hastings2025AIX (Tech, Toxins, and Memphis: Evaluating the Environmental Footprint of the xAI Facility)
For some facts, the colossus data center is next-door to a steel mill and city sewage treatment plant, a vacated gigawatt scale coal power plant complete with nasty Coal Ash Ponds, and a brand new combined cycle gas power plant. The area is at the far edge of Memphis city limits up against the river, in a heavy industrial area. There’s even a major Valero oil refinery right there too.
Memphis has trillions and trillions of gallons of water, both in a gigantic underground aquifers and the Mississippi River itself. xAI has agreed to shed load in case of impending brownouts. The fear mongering is out of control.
They had a ton of portable turbines that were under operating under a temporary permit, and that was the disputed part. However, the blame should rest with TVA and or Memphis light gas and water for not being able to run an appropriate high voltage connection less than 1 mile from the plant to the data center in a timely manner. However… What difference does it make if the natural gas is burned at TVA plant or very similar gas turbines on site in the same neighborhood. Environmental groups and the county health department tried suing, was struck down, xAI works closely with the State, but the whining continues. xAI is paying gargantuan taxes to the city, no tax breaks.
These environmental groups do not care about the nasty unregulated cars burning oil, that I have to breathe every day. We terminated our motor vehicle inspection requirements due to the “burden” it places on the low income population. So they can burn their oil in my face, but then they sue to stop a SOTA turbine in an industrial area? There are junkyards in these same areas that burn their piles of waste tires every year or so “on accident”. No lawsuits there either.
[0] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/regulations/how-are-data...
> Thus, when it comes to income tax, at least, many data centers – especially hyperscale data centers owned by large companies – don’t generate tax revenue because they don’t generate direct operating income.
For all the big talk from U.S.-Americans on European 'overregulation', they sure seem to have much more dystopian societal failure modes materialize.
The plan was to develop a recycled wastewater facility, which will pull arsenic from contaminated shallow acquifers, and pump that into the drinking water supply's acquifers.
Source: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...
Since Cursor often relies on Claude models, some of those services will flow back to their own datacenter compute. Especially if there's, lets call it, "customer demand loadbalancing optimization agreements" that makes those Cursor services prioritize Claude models using the app keys that get load-balanced onto the SpaceX datacenter.
Did SpaceX just spend $10B to rent out its own datacenter, juicing their recurring revenue metrics with their own AI services investment?
It is publicly known that the vast majority of deals in the AI space are circular in nature without the need for explicitly encoding any of it in a legal contract or even tacit agreements.
e.g. Nvidia has invested significantly in many AI companies including both Anthropic and OpenAI which rely heavily on Nvidia's hardware and will undoubtedly use some of said investment towards that end.
Companies appear to be spending endless billions on AI but ultimately it's a huge wank.
Investors in the SpaceX IPO are buying a call option on Musk.
At least he doesn't come across as a happy person...
While i'm really curious though when someone might hit him back after all the garbage he did and still does
If he could fill his Datacenter with Grok use, he would make a lot more money.
This is not a good sign at all.
From Elon on X: ... After that, I was ok leasing Colossus 1 to Anthropic, as SpaceXAI had already moved training to Colossus 2.
Then you've got SpaceX buying 1200 cybertrucks from Tesla, so it's serving as failure laundering vehicle for all his endeavors.
Which would be fine to me if Tesla wasn't a publicly traded company and SpaceX wasn't about to IPO. Whereas juicing companies in a way that affects the open stock market feels very inappropriate.
Anthropic gets the compute they so desperately need to keep growing. Elon rents out compute that xAI couldn't make use of due to little demand for Grok. SpaceX gets revenue on the books for IPO.
PS. I want to translate this part:
We’re very intentional about where we’ll add capacity—partnering with democratic countries whose legal and regulatory frameworks support investments of this scale
We're putting profits above anything else. Yes, Elon is a far right guy who supported Trump, a president who isn't very democratic, but we're just really desperate for more money. We're also trying to make you forget that xAI is funded by Middle East non-democratic governments. Heck, we'll even buy compute from China if we can sell Anthropic models there.Considering that Anthropic mass-bans Chinese users accounts based on using VPN (used to circumvent the Chinese firewall) and then demands an ID or a residence permit of a country where Claude officially works to ensure that the user doesn't live in China, seems unlikely.
What's the problem here exactly? Are you insinuating any non-democratic government is bad and evil and only democratic governments are the correct and right way to govern? sort of like: "there is only one true prophet, and it's the one I follow, and all the others are false!"
The ones run by people who chop up journalists certainly are.
My point is that Anthropic cares a lot about "democracy" but will buy compute from a data center mostly funded by non-democratic nations.
But assuming there are people that care, if a government doesn't derive its right to govern from the will of the people it governs, under what definitions can it be considered legitimate? Divine right of kings?
America could do so much to compel the world to work in from a human rights perspective rather than petrodollars. I can't imagine any serious person would say the average American benefits from US imperialism. All US politicians did was traded away were secure middle class lifestyle for cheaper widgets, hardly anything worth caring about.
Who benefits from American petrodollar policies? Not Americans, all the wealth gets extracted to the elites while civilians suffer from the imperial blowback/boomerang.
Look at what the new deal coalition brought in and they nearly burnt out enough to allow neoliberalism to flourish during their fall. What do we have in return? No universal healthcare, no universal childcare, a broken welfare system, increasing income inequality, losing the ability to make a better life.
Anthropic is either taking this space business more serious than the general public, or posting this sentence was part of the deal to get the compute.
This 100%
There is no doubt that it's not a serious idea.
That claim seems reasonable. I have zero knowledge of the economics of launching and maintaining satellites though.
I suppose if you are desperate to justify a large investment this what you would do - frame the story in a particular way.
Once computer constraints ease up, you will see much larger models. The reason LLM seems to have stalled a bit is because there just not enough compute.
You have more people using AI which requires more compute, and you want to build larger models which requires more compute and you have limited compute. What do you do?
If it happens it happens, if not, it doesn't.
This is stupid. I don't understand what's happening... specifically, what mental virus is spreading that lowers everybody's IQ by 10-20 points, evidently including my own. Put the data centers in the ocean, powered by solar and networked with Starlink or LEO. Put them in the desert. Put them 20 miles south of Nowhere, Idaho.
But space?!
Elon claims (which I take with a huge grain of salt because he's made endless broken promises in investor calls and interviews) that he disagrees with the administration's stance on solar and would use it to power his DCs if he could, but contends that permitting is a huge problem.
The US needs to figure out how to build again.
> This is stupid. I don't understand what's happening... specifically, what mental virus
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes"
I want to be clear, I do think that one day something like that will exist, I just don't think it's anywhere close to being a reality, much like FSD.
Also it costs them, almost [0], nothing to say it and then later come up with some reason why they are no longer interested.
[0] Maybe a little bit of respect
All it says is expressed interest.
That's like asking a casual how are you...
You honestly expect this trajectory to continue unabated?
Knowing humanity's history, yes. Not sure we're ever going to see a second French Revolution. People are pacified and are not rioting. And they really should. Most of us are kind of privileged. I know people out there who are barely holding on and the recent fuel + food price increases might push them over the edge to actual poverty.
I'm just a software engineer, all I need to know is SpaceX is aggressively pursuing this - that's enough for me to believe it's viable
SpaceX operates literally orders of magnitudes more satellites than anyone else. If anybody understands the physics and engineering of space compute, it's SpaceX. Lay people debating this online is just showing their ignorance as far as I'm concerned, and it mostly comes from an emotional place of wanting Musk enterprises to fail
I also hope that the fact I had OpenClaw in my sandbox once is not why I hit these limits so damn fast. I don't use it anymore and I've tried to rid my sandbox of anything "openclaw" but it is in my git history in various places on various projects. Claude doesn't seem to be transparent about this limitation.
- Codex
- OpenCode Go
- Ollama Cloud
All are very useful, still a subscription, but with higher usage limits.
Specific providers like GLM also provide subscriptions like Z.ai.
Using DeepSeek, Kimi etc. through OpenRouter or from them directly is also great, here you pay per token but it's still more usage overall.
The 5h windows are frustrating because I can go through them quickly if I have a more complex task. I haven't yet met the weekly limit. I'd say there are many cases similar to mine.
On heavy weeks I probably am using it consistently for at least 6+ hours a day.
Although, I’m pretty rigorous about always keeping my sessions under 200-250k tokens.
Mentally i think about the weekly usage in terms of usage per day so about 14% per day which results in me not using that much early in the week so i can kinda "burn freely" later on. which leads me to a spot where usually on the final two days im sorta thinking about how can i expend that usage ive "saved".
the 5 hour windows make this harder, sometimes the final day of the week im trying to get that 10% in every 5 hour window of my waking hours and i HATE that, i wanna work when i am most productive, not around some ridiculous window of time, i dont wanna think "I am gonna be utilizing claude the most around 11am so i should send a dumb message to haiku to get my 5 hour window started at 7:30am so i can have it roll over at 12:30."
So im happy about this change sure. But it is 100% them creating a problem and pretending having some relief from that problem is them doing their users a favor. I understand they are doing it to lower peak hours usage and all that, I still despise it.
Using Advisor [1], you can use Sonnet most of time; Sonnet can handoff work it can't handle to Opus. When Opus is done, you automatically go back to Sonnet.
[1]: https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/claude-code-advisor-strategy-...
I hit my weekly limit around day 4, with 2 maxed out windows per day (and sometimes a bit of usage at night).
I completely understand why people would use Opus for everything, it’s much more thorough and effective. Sonnet as well, but on Pro it’s gonna be Haiku all the time.
20%, there are 5 work days in a week, not 7.
However you see it, it's an improvement for the consumer.
>The following three changes—all effective today—are aimed at improving the experience of using Claude for our most dedicated customers.
>First, we’re doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans.
>Second, we’re removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts.
>Third, we’re raising our API rate limits considerably for Claude Opus models,
Looks like Elon's finally giving up on XAI and just selling the compute
I don't think that's certain yet, but I do think that the open-source models like Gemma and Qwen are getting so good so fast that even Anthropic has real risk around the long-term value of their models and tooling.
Basically, if I'm Anthropic or xAI, I try to get revenue whenever and wherever possible and see what sticks. There's no value in playing for monopolistic control when everything is so volatile.
But even then, I suspect their hands were tied in some areas because Elon had some expectations from his AI.
I'm just speculating, but a particularly killer offering Elon wouldnt be able to refuse would be if Anthropic agreed to give them some training data / technology.
Or is that actually his main motivation. Hard to know. Either way it's a win win win for him.
On the other hand, power and compute are limited. Ridiculous as orbital compute sounds, land/power on earth is not easily scalable. There are too many limiting factors, chief among which in the US is regulation. But in space, if you make one satellite work, you just get more resources and launch more. This also leads naturally to Tesla's plan for a chip fab.
So if you squint, Musk might not be that crazy.
-Elon
The scale is just mindboggling here. Are there any blog posts or anything discussing what kind of infrastructure is used for even just the inference side (nevermind the training) for SotA models like Opus? I would have thought it might be secret, but given that you can actually run the models yourself on AWS Bedrock doesn't that give an indication?
> It’s regulation with the utilities. There are ramp rates, there are all of these things that you’re supposed to do to not screw up the grid. Data centers have been in gross violation of that. When you think about what’s wrong with data centers, they have load volatility, which we just talked about, then they decide to power it with behind-the-meter natural gas generators. These natural gas generators, their shaft is supposed to last for seven years. It’s lasting 10 months because of all the cycling.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/doing-data-centers-the-not-dumb-way
On the compute infrastructure, there are standard NVIDIA reference designs like this:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/technologies/enterprise-referen...
I haven't bothered to look but I'd guess Mellanox GPU-to-GPU networks, and massive custom code for splitting tensors across GPUs, and for shuttling activations across GPU nodes.
That's not exactly how it works. Anthropic are hosting their models in AWS Bedrock as a managed service. Customers call those LLMs just like calling any other API. There's no visibility into what kind of AWS infrastructure is serving that API request.
The massive scale is all massively parallel: test-time compute for users, test time compute for RL rollouts (and probably increasingly environments for those rollouts), other synthetic data generation, research experiments, …
That’s just for the SpaceX part (over provisioning for grok, lol).
The Amazon and Google deals are each over an order of magnitude larger! Pretty wild indeed!
While this is good news, I'm not coming back. Anthropic just lost me with too many wrongs in too short of a time period.
Opus has been replaced with GPT 5.5, DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen and they all allow me to use my own, single harness and switch models easily if any of them start treating me the same.
The only certainty is that you can swap models quickly and painlessly.
Having said that, Anthropic’s position is fully understandable, as Sam took a very large risk here, and OpenAI’s future is all but certain.
Yes.
To quote:
> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said his company tried to plan for 10-fold growth. But revenue and usage increased 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis, which he says explains why it’s been so hard to keep up with demand.
> “That is the reason we have had difficulties with compute,” Amodei said Wednesday at his company’s developer conference in San Francisco. Amodei added that the company is “working as quickly as possible to provide more” capacity and will “pass that compute on to you as soon as we can.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/06/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-s...
I think "scrambling" is a fair characterization of the CEO saying "we have had difficulties with compute" and "working as quickly as possible to provide more"
They've also signed new compute deals with Google and AWS recently.
The fine-print-omission appears to be that weekly limits are not doubled. The progressive 5-hour rate limit shrinking was indeed an efficiency blocker that finally convinced me to cancel, but being only able to get 4 full sessions a week as opposed to 8 doesn't compell me to resubscribe.
At this point if feels like if you properly scope your work open weight LLMs are adequate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)#Envir...
Now I have to avoid Claude too.
That’s what virtue signaling is I guess - the action you’re taking is pointless, the only point is to tell everyone you’re taking it therefore feed the narrative forward?
The entire economy runs off gas turbines though this is the thing you boycott?
But more than that, the emissions generated by the Colossus data centers are far worse than typical combined-cycle gas plants or data centers that buy renewable: these turbines emit NOx, fine particulates, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde into a population-dense area.
I thought people knew about this already. Post from last year: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/12/xai-data-center/
Deciding not to spend money with a company you don't like is not pointless. The point is that you're not participating in something that you judge to be wrong.
The world is full of things I feel are wrong yet have near zero power to stop. That does not mean I should willingly support those things.
Hopefully Elon lets you into his glass bubble when the s** cooks on the fan.
This is nothing like burning coal.
SpaceX/xAI also has Colossus 2, with double or more the GPUs
Seems xAI will still be around
300MW is peanuts compared to their multiple 50GW+ deals to the point you start to wonder why just 300MW is making the difference in their capacity that they can increase limits this much... also, why couldn't their many existing multi billion dollar deals not allow them to expand capacity?
when you take this into account, then you read their statement about orbital compute it starts to smell quite fishy
There aren’t that many 300MW+ datacenter in the world, relative to the capacity Anthropic has online, it’s a lot, probably in the 20% range.
Certainly an interesting day for xAI.
He literally did a Nazi salute on stage, twice! Check the video, and tell me what you see.
edit: https://giphy.com/gifs/elon-musk-nazi-salute-8W0ItVv7T1kRdwb...
* Inference becomes cheap
- speciality accelerators hit the market and race to the bottom begins
* Training remains expensive
- This works out for Anthropic/OpenAI, they go into the business of training
* Models become rental units or purchasable assets, you run on inference hardware
- Rent or own inference hardware
* Or you pay someone to do all of the above for you, at a premium
Groq (acqui-hired by NVidia) came up with a different processor architecture: metric shit-tons of SRAM attached to a modest single core deterministic processor. No HBM needed on this card, and 32x faster inference than today's best GPUs at inference!
These LPUs are pretty useless for training though, which is useful for companies training models! Training is expensive, inference is cheap (someday, not now).
There's also a Canadian company that _literally burned the model as a silicon mask_ on a chip. It's unbelievably (1000x) fast, but not flexible of course: https://chatjimmy.ai
Today they say this, then tomorrow they'll silently reduce limits and argue with anyone who calls them on it.
So, they handed out all of their data center to Anthropic; Grok wasn't using it much?
xAI has added about 500MW of nvidia gpu capacity in ~April
and will add another 500MW before the end of the year totaling about 2GW.
[0] https://wccftech.com/xai-using-just-11-percent-gpus-while-me...
To me this is the mind-bending piece. It's not a like a datacenter has a plug-and-play with well written spec and an international standard interface.
On the plus-side, it told me how much cheaper Deepseek is and that it's on parity for reverse engineering work.
Ok I guess, this was a bit of a hassle, but you're not increasing my weekly allowance, you're just not annoying me as often.
> Second, we’re removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts.
It wasn't a limit reduction (as in, I didn't have a lower 5-hour limit), it was "tokens are more expensive" and it ate my weekly limits faster. This should never have been instituted to begin with.
> Third, we’re raising our API rate limits considerably for Claude Opus models, as shown in the table below:
Meh.
This is why I don't care for all the "it's a subscription, you're free to not use it!" arguments here. It's not an all-you-can-eat subscription with some generous fair use limits, it's a "X tokens per month for $Y", and they keep lowering the X unilaterally and in secret.
This might be a good time to drop Claude.
I have got xAI blocked in OpenRouter as I do not want to support any business controlled by Musk.
I'm starting to think the problem with "ethical" AI was always that no company could ever act ethically in the long term. They are and always will be a cancer to society and AI will only serve to amplify this further.
*Buys compute from actual fascist Elon Musk in a failing democracy during the death throes of late state capitalism.
My first impression to this post is "what the hell are they thinking?", but actually it seems like a decent move by them.
They basically made it so that normal users can better utilize their plan while not benefitting the backgroundagentmaxxers and stealth openclaw abusers in the ranks of their subscription audience. Making their plan more attractive to the people they actually want to sell to.
Hopefully this leads to a loosening of harness restrictions later.
Staying with Claude is like going back to the restaurant where you got food poisoning: you kinda get what you deserve next time you get sick.
SpaceX is extremely uniquely positioned to crush the rest of the world combined in order to orbital data centers.
Sure, as long as your data center is 3x4m - size of a Starlink satellite (think Spinal Tap Stone Henge) . Anything bigger than that (i.e. actual data center sized) is going to require some assembly.
I've heard TeslaBot is good at folding shirts, and serving drinks (at least while teleoperated) - perhaps it can help?
In any case, it appears that Musk can't even generate enough AI demand to utilize his own ground based data center. Maybe he can add "data centers in space" to part of his Mars colonization plan. Maybe have Tesla Bots driving around in Cybertrucks too ?
1. GPUs create heat. There's no efficient way to get rid of the heat in space (vacuum is an insulator). 2. Die-shrink makes modern processors and memory more and more susceptible to radiation; shielding is possible, but adds cost + mass (which adds cost)
1. https://wccftech.com/xai-using-just-11-percent-gpus-while-me...
I'm posting immediately after cancelling my claude subscriptions.
Elon doesn't figure out anything. He pays people to do it and then tries to take the credit.
what are we even talking about
But, if you will pardon a little rant: I hate the idea of subscription inference plans and also 'dumping' by subsidizing non-profitable products. Inferencing should be pay as you go and dumping illegal.