xAI's cat-and-mouse game with Anthropic: First, they freeloaded Claude through distillation; then, they became landlords of computing power.

According to Beating's monitoring, Elon Musk's xAI has been exposed for engaging in a long-term cat-and-mouse game with Anthropic. To catch up with its competitor, xAI conducted a months-long distillation project, directly training its code model on Claude's output. Even after Anthropic blocked official access channels, this guerrilla-style data extraction continued. In January of this year, xAI co-founder Tony Wu informed employees that the official access channel had been cut off. Subsequently, xAI engineers accessed the Claude interface through personal accounts, prompting Anthropic to block the associated accounts. After the accounts were blocked, xAI turned to the third-party crypto intermediary platform Blackbox AI to indirectly access the interface, continuing to acquire data for benchmarking until mid-May 2026. In a lawsuit against OpenAI in May of this year, Musk admitted that Grok's training part used competitors' models, stating that cross-model training is common practice in the industry. This cat-and-mouse game escalated into a dramatic computing power leasing deal in May. Facing a bottleneck in computing power, Anthropic decided to lease data center computing power from xAI for $1.25 billion per month. Although Musk has repeatedly claimed that the computing power lease is only a short-term measure, the massive influx of funds has alleviated the pressure of losses in the xAI division. While the computing power contract cannot offset the huge losses caused by xAI in the first quarter, it provides a key AI growth story for SpaceX, which is rushing to make its initial public offering on Wall Street next week.