xAI's Cat-and-Mouse Game with Anthropic: Front Paw Distilling with Claude, Back Paw Transforming into a Hash Power Landlord

According to DataInsight Beating monitoring, Musk's xAI was exposed to a long-standing cat-and-mouse game with Anthropic. In order to outpace its competitors, xAI conducted a months-long distillation project, directly training code models on Claude's output. Even though Anthropic blocked the official access channel, guerrilla data scraping has been ongoing.

In January of this year, xAI co-founder Tony Wu informed employees that the official channel had been severed. Subsequently, xAI engineers resorted to accessing the Claude interface through personal accounts, leading Anthropic to ban the associated accounts. After the accounts were blocked, xAI turned to the third-party encrypted intermediary platform Blackbox AI to indirectly invoke the interface, still accessing data for benchmarking tests as of mid-May 2026. Musk admitted in a May lawsuit with OpenAI that Grok's training portion used a competitor's model and stated that cross-model training is an industry norm.

This cat-and-mouse game evolved into a dramatic computing power leasing deal in May. Faced with a computational bottleneck, Anthropic decided to lease data center computing power to xAI for $1.25 billion per month. Although Musk repeatedly claimed that the computing power rental was only a short-term action, the influx of huge funds eased the losses in the xAI sector. While the computing power contract is unlikely to offset the massive first-quarter loss caused by xAI, it provides a crucial AI growth story for SpaceX, which is set to IPO on Wall Street next week.