Cutting a Deal Using Hatfield-McCoy Method

May 19, 2026

Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are engaged in a complex legal dust up. One notable characteristic of the trial is the number of childish, petty, and duplicitous behaviors presented by both sides. If I were in this type of high stakes AI game, I would be somewhat cautious in my dealings with Elon (Full Self Driving) Musk.

I read “Musk Once Called Anthropic Evil. He Is Now Powering His Woke Competitor’s AI Expansion.” The Euro News article says:

Musk’s SpaceX has leased its Colossus 1 supercomputer to Anthropic, giving Claude’s maker a massive compute boost despite a previously bitter rivalry.

I immediately thought, “Trust.”

Thanks, Venice.ai. Two young executives has become two geezers. Close enough.

The article continues:

The deal gives Anthropic access to more than “more than 300 megawatts of new capacity [and] over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs within the month,” according to a subsequent Anthropic statement, and will directly benefit subscribers to its Claude Pro and Claude Max plans. A Musk-Anthropic union is as unlikely as they come. The man who called Anthropic “evil” and a company that “hates Western civilization” a mere months ago now controls the infrastructure powering the expansion of Claude and enabling the rollout of extended programs for its paying users.

Euro News points out:

The company’s entire brand identity is built on “responsible AI,” and its models are trained with Constitutional AI, a framework with baked-in ethical constraints that Claude’s developers say makes it more likely than its competitors to decline requests, express uncertainty about sensitive topics or push back on prompts it deems harmful.

I wonder if Elon Musk is aware of the criminal investigation into Grok in France. Is Anthropic considering this investigation? The article reports:

The ultimate hit that collapsed Grok’s brand came in early 2026 when the chatbot generated at least 1.8 million sexualized depictions of women over nine days, along with imagery of minors, triggering investigations by regulators across Europe, Asia and the United States.

On the surface, Anthropic gets compute. As the company moves forward with opportunities in Europe, will the tie up with Elon Musk become an issue? I predict that some questions about the interaction of Mr. Musk’s infrastructure and Anthropic will be surface in some French government circles.

It will be interesting to see how this “deal” plays out. In the meantime, the Musk-Altman legal matter provides an opportunity to learn more about these two big AI tech luminaries (BAIT) approach their business relationships. A dispute between Mr. Musk and Anthropic, if one surfaces, will produce more information about the business methods of BAIT outfits.

Stephen E Arnold, May 19, 2026

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Business strategy, Infrastructure, Investment, News, OSINT

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.