Elon Musk attacks Anthropic as 'misanthropic and evil' after $30B funding round values AI rival

Elon Musk Launches Attack on Anthropic AI After Record Funding

Elon Musk called Anthropic's AI "misanthropic and evil" on Thursday, just hours after the AI firm Anthropic announced a $30 billion funding round that valued the artificial intelligence startup at $380 billion post-money valuation 1

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. The massive raise positions Anthropic as one of the most capitalized private companies globally and the most valuable AI lab outside of OpenAI 1

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Responding to Anthropic's tweet announcing its Series G raise, co-led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and investment firm Coatue, Musk alleged that the company's AI systems show bias against certain demographic groups. "Your AI hates Whites & Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals and men," Musk wrote on X 2

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. "This is misanthropic and evil. Fix it." The Tesla CEO did not provide specific examples to support his claims 2

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Musk also targeted the company's branding, suggesting an ironic fate. "Frankly, I don't think there is anything you can do to escape the inevitable irony of Anthropic ending up being Misanthropic," he added. "You were doomed to this fate when you chose your name" 1

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Musk's Criticism of Anthropic Comes Amid xAI Turmoil

The attack on Anthropic lands at a difficult moment for Musk's own AI venture. Between February 3 and 11, more than a dozen senior researchers departed xAI, including co-founders Jimmy Ba and Yuhuai "Tony" Wu, who led reasoning and reported directly to Musk 1

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. Some departures were attributed to the company's pending integration with SpaceX, while others said they were leaving to start new ventures 1

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The timing underscores the intensifying AI company competition between xAI's Grok chatbot and Anthropic's Claude large language models 4

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. In January, after reports suggested Anthropic had restricted xAI's access to Claude models, Musk offered measured praise while expressing frustration, calling the cutoff "a helpful motivator" for xAI, though "not good for their karma" 4

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Anthropic's Explosive Growth and Industry Position

Anthropic's Series G round was co-led by D. E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX, with participation from Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Temasek, the Qatar Investment Authority, and dozens of other institutional investors 1

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. A portion includes previously announced investments from Microsoft and NVIDIA 1

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The company said its annualized run-rate revenue has reached $14 billion, growing more than 10x annually for three consecutive years 1

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. Claude Code alone has surpassed $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue, more than doubling since the start of 2026, with recent analysis estimating it now authors 4% of all public GitHub commits worldwide 1

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. The raise trails only OpenAI's $40 billion SoftBank-led round last year 1

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Rival AI Companies Escalate Public Battle

Competition between Anthropic and OpenAI has accelerated, with the firms releasing rival models Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex within an hour of each other, splitting benchmark leads across enterprise reasoning and agentic coding tasks 1

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. The rivalry has turned public through Super Bowl ads and product jabs, with Anthropic mocking ChatGPT ads and OpenAI rolling out limited ad tests hours later 1

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Musk's relationship with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has deteriorated into open warfare. Last month, the two clashed publicly after Musk warned followers against using ChatGPT, citing posts linking the chatbot to nine deaths. Altman fired back, pointing to reports of more than 50 deaths linked to Tesla's Autopilot 1

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. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but stepped away from its board in 2018, and has since filed multiple lawsuits against the company, accusing it of abandoning its nonprofit mission 1

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AI Safety and Regulatory Tensions

Anthropic, founded with a focus on AI safety by CEO Dario Amodei, has at times found itself at odds with members of the Trump administration and Silicon Valley allies 2

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. The company backed California AI regulation requiring major AI companies to disclose safety information, signed into law in September 2

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. White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks previously accused Anthropic of being "woke," to which Dario Amodei responded that "Anthropic, the administration, and leaders across the political spectrum want the same thing" 2

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As AI-related groups ramp up spending on upcoming midterm elections, Anthropic announced it was giving $20 million to Public First Action, a group launched to support efforts developing AI safeguards 2

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. The company separately announced that Chris Liddell, who served as deputy White House chief of staff in Trump's first administration, was joining its board of directors 2

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