xAI Secretly Distills Claude, Continues Data Access Through Workarounds; Anthropic Leases $1.25B/Month in Chips to xAI

According to Beating, xAI spent months training its models using Claude outputs, prompting Anthropic to ban official access in January. After xAI engineers attempted to access the interface through personal accounts, Anthropic blocked those accounts as well. Undeterred, xAI pivoted to third-party platform Blackbox AI to continue retrieving data for benchmarking through mid-May.

In May, the situation took a dramatic turn as Anthropic began leasing data center compute to xAI for $1.25 billion monthly. While Musk characterized the arrangement as temporary, the influx provided crucial financial relief to xAI's operations and supports SpaceX's AI growth narrative ahead of its planned IPO.