How long is Anthropic’s lease with SpaceX? Opinions vary.

Earlier this month, xAI signed a major computing deal with Anthropic, pledging to pay billions of dollars a month for exclusive use of the company’s Colossus cluster. It was a coup for both companies, giving xAI some much-needed revenue and helping Anthropic catch up in the never-ending race to compute.

But this morning on X, Elon Musk downplayed SpaceX’s commitment to the deal.

“SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years, although it is possible that this could happen,” he said in response to one user. “This is a 180-day lease with a 90-day mutual cancellation notice after that. Short term was our request, not Anthropic’s request. We won’t leave them hanging and will provide a reasonable way out, but if computing gets too tight, I said we might need it again at some point.”

Musk’s statement directly contradicts SpaceX’s recent S-1 filing, which confirms the standard 90-day cancellation but presents the deal as a three-year agreement. Page F-62 of the file states:

On May 3, 2026, the Company entered into a cloud services agreement with Anthropic PBC, a public benefit corporation for artificial intelligence research and development, regarding access to computing power. Under this agreement, the customer agreed to pay monthly fees through May 2029, with capacity increasing in May 2026 at reduced fees. Either party may terminate the Agreement upon 90 days’ notice. The Client will retain ownership and intellectual property rights in its content, AI models and related data.

The key point here is that Anthropic “has agreed to pay monthly fees through May 2029” — a pretty clear description of a three-year lease. The same language from the F-96 is repeated in slightly different form (“The customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029”) on pages 13 and 146, so it’s not as if there’s a typo.

xAI did not respond to a request for clarification.

We can probably argue about whether Anthropic agreeing to pay for a service means the same thing as SpaceX agreeing to provide that service, but that’s not what “rent” usually means. And why book one-way if either party can terminate the deal with three months’ notice anyway?

The deal isn’t in front of me, so I don’t know what it’s saying — and neither SpaceX nor Anthropic said anything about the duration of the deal in their announcements. However, there should be a very clear truth about the matter here, and it’s not the kind of thing you want to make false statements about during a quiet period for the company.

As always, we should note that the SEC probably won’t do anything — and even if it did, Elon probably wouldn’t care. But this type of material misrepresentation appears to be done while marketing the security, which is bad, to say the least.

Sean O’Kane contributed to this article.