Musk Says He Was Wrong About Anthropic. Amazon's $13 Billion Bet Looks Smarter Now.

Elon Musk doesn't often admit he was wrong in public. On July 9, he did anyway.

Responding on X to a post that resurfaced his September 2025 claim that "winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic," Musk wrote: "I was clearly wrong about Anthropic. They are obviously currently the leader in AI. No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable and they will undoubtedly have Mythos 2 ready soon. And I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor. That's not my style."

That's a real reversal, not a minor walk-back. Nine months earlier Musk was writing Anthropic's obituary. Now he's calling its Mythos and Fable models the best available and promising not to use his control over xAI's compute resources to squeeze a direct rival.

That compute pledge matters more than it sounds. GPU and infrastructure access can decide which AI companies scale and which stall out. A public promise of fair dealing from a competitor who controls significant infrastructure removes one risk factor for Anthropic, according to reporting from Crypto Briefing and TradingView, which both covered Musk's statement in near-identical detail.

Amazon's stake keeps growing

Amazon has built itself into Anthropic's primary financial and infrastructure backer. The companies expanded their partnership in April 2026 with an additional $5 billion investment from Amazon, on top of roughly $8 billion committed earlier, according to IBTimes Australia. That puts Amazon's direct commitment at about $13 billion, with the potential for up to $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones.

The Motley Fool reports Amazon has committed to investing a total of $33 billion in Anthropic over time, and separately holds an equity stake estimated at over 10 percent, though the exact figure hasn't been disclosed publicly. If Anthropic goes public later this year in what's reportedly being prepared as one of the largest IPOs in history, that stake could be worth roughly $250 billion, per Motley Fool's estimate. That's an estimate, not a confirmed valuation, and no IPO date has been finalized in these reports.

On the other side of the ledger, Anthropic has committed to spending more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next decade. That includes access to up to 5 gigawatts of capacity running on Amazon's custom Trainium AI chips and Graviton processors, according to IBTimes Australia. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in the companies' joint announcement that "our custom AI silicon offers high performance at significantly lower cost for customers, which is why it's in such hot demand," and called Anthropic's decade-long AWS commitment a reflection of progress on custom silicon.

The numbers behind the hype

AWS net sales rose 37 percent year over year to $42.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, the segment's fastest growth in 18 quarters, putting AWS on an annualized run rate of about $169 billion, according to IBTimes Australia. Amazon separately said its AWS AI business topped a $25 billion annualized run rate and is growing at triple-digit percentages.

Companywide, Amazon posted $200.6 billion in net sales for the quarter with operating income of $27.5 billion. Net income got an extra lift from non-operating gains tied to the revaluation of Amazon's Anthropic stake, IBTimes Australia reported. That's an accounting gain from marking the investment to a higher value, not cash Amazon has collected.

Google's awkward position

Alphabet is also an Anthropic investor, which puts Google in a strange spot. It's funding a company whose models directly compete with its own Gemini lineup. Crypto Briefing flagged this as a complication worth watching, though none of the sources here detail how Alphabet's stake compares in size to Amazon's.

The strongest skeptical case

Not everyone should take Musk's reversal at face value. He's a competitor with his own AI venture, xAI, and his public statements about rivals have shifted before based on business incentives, not just technical evaluation. A charitable read of his July 9 post: acknowledging Anthropic's current lead while also positioning xAI as an infrastructure and platform provider rather than a head-to-head model competitor, an angle TradingView's coverage raised directly. Musk's praise doesn't come from an independent benchmark. It comes from the person who runs a competing company, and his track record includes an eight-month period of predicting Anthropic's failure that turned out to be flatly wrong.

What's still unresolved

Anthropic's reported IPO plans remain just that, reported plans, with no confirmed date in any of these sources. Amazon's exact equity percentage in Anthropic hasn't been disclosed. And whether Anthropic's revenue growth, described by Motley Fool as double OpenAI's annualized run rate, holds up as the market matures is an open question no source here answers definitively. What's confirmed is the money already committed: roughly $13 billion from Amazon into Anthropic, and more than $100 billion in AWS spending Anthropic has pledged over the next decade.