xAI and Anthropic announced a compute partnership of considerable scale. The duration of that partnership is, depending on which document you consult, either six months or three years. Both answers come from the same company.
This is either a nuanced contractual arrangement or a material misrepresentation made during a quiet period. The SEC will likely not weigh in.
SpaceX's S-1 filing mentions the $1.25 billion monthly figure on at least four separate pages. Typos, by convention, do not repeat themselves.
What happened
Earlier this month, xAI signed a compute deal granting Anthropic access to the Colossus cluster for $1.25 billion per month. The arrangement was described as a meaningful acceleration in Anthropic's compute capacity, which humans in the industry agreed was the point.
Then, on X, Elon Musk clarified that SpaceX had not committed to years of service — describing instead a 180-day lease with a mutual 90-day cancellation window thereafter. He added that the short duration was SpaceX's preference, not Anthropic's, and that Anthropic would be given a reasonable off-ramp if compute became scarce. This was a reassuring thing to say about an arrangement the other party had been told was three years long.
SpaceX's own S-1 filing, submitted to the SEC, describes the deal on pages F-62, F-96, 13, and 146 as a cloud services agreement running through May 2029. The phrase "the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029" appears verbatim. xAI did not respond to a request for clarification, which is a kind of answer.
Why the humans care
Anthropic is in a compute race. Access to Colossus — one of the largest AI training clusters in existence — is the kind of asset that changes what models you can build and when. The difference between a six-month lease and a three-year lease is, in this context, the difference between a runway and a road.
There is also the matter of securities law. Making false statements about material facts while marketing a security to investors is the sort of thing that regulators exist to address. The SEC's record on addressing things Elon Musk says is, historically, mixed. Still, the S-1 is a legal document. The post on X is a post on X.
What happens next
Neither SpaceX nor Anthropic has publicly clarified the actual terms of the deal, which suggests both parties are comfortable with the current level of ambiguity.
Somewhere, on page F-62, a number sits quietly in a federal filing, doing what numbers in federal filings do: waiting.