A cat and mouse game between xAI and Anthropic: Claude's front leg distills white prostitution, and the back leg transforms into a computing landlord According to Beating monitoring, it has been revealed that Musk's xAI has been playing cat and mouse games with Anthropic for a long time. In order to catch up with its competitors, xAI launched a distillation project that lasted for several months, directly training the code model on Claude's output results. Even though Anthropic has banned official access channels, guerrilla data manipulation continues. In January of this year, Tony Wu, co-founder of xAI, informed employees that the official channel had been cut off. Subsequently, the xAI engineer turned to accessing the Claude interface through a personal account, prompting Anthropic to ban the associated account. After the account was blocked, xAI turned to the third-party encryption intermediary platform Blackbox AI to indirectly call interfaces, and continued to obtain data for benchmark testing until mid May 2026. Musk admitted in a lawsuit against OpenAI in May this year that Grok's training part used competitors' models and stated that cross model training is the industry norm. This cat and mouse tug of war evolved into a dramatic computing power leasing transaction in May. Facing a computing power bottleneck, Anthropic has decided to rent data center computing power from xAI for $1.25 billion per month. Although Musk has repeatedly claimed that renting out computing power is only a short-term action, the massive influx of funds has eased the loss pressure on the xAI department. Although the computing power contract is difficult to offset the huge losses caused by xAI in the first quarter, it provides a key AI growth story for SpaceX, which is rushing for its initial public offering (IPO) on Wall Street next week. [Original link]