AI Rivals Keep Becoming Business Partners

Despite public feuds and legal battles, AI's biggest competitors keep striking deals. After banning xAI from using its Claude models and trading insults with Elon Musk, Anthropic agreed to rent xAI's entire Colossus 1 data center, over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, following SpaceX's $1.25 trillion merger with xAI left it with surplus compute capacity. The rivalry traces back to 2010, when Musk invested in DeepMind before Google acquired it. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015, departed its board in 2018, and is now suing the company in federal court. The pattern repeats: ideological splits produce new competitors, who eventually find commercial reasons to cooperate.