{"text":[[{"start":10.95,"text":"Elon Musk has described a major computing deal with Anthropic as merely “a 180-day lease”, calling into question how his rocket group SpaceX characterised the agreement in its initial public offering prospectus last week."}],[{"start":25.45,"text":"SpaceX in its pre-IPO filing last week said the AI start-up had “agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029”, making the total value of the contract as high as $45bn."}],[{"start":40.2,"text":"This agreement would go a long way to offsetting billions in capital spending by SpaceX’s AI unit, formerly xAI, which has been a financial drag on the wider company ahead of its ambitious listing in the coming weeks."}],[{"start":53.400000000000006,"text":"But on Thursday Musk posted on X that the Anthropic arrangement was merely “a 180 day lease with 90 day notice mutual cancellation”, greatly reducing the revenue promised to SpaceX under the deal. "}],[{"start":67.65,"text":"Musk added the short-term structure “was our request, not Anthropic’s” and that the rocket group might need the computing capacity back “if compute gets super tight”."}],[{"start":77.55000000000001,"text":"A person familiar with the contract’s terms said it has a minimum length of 180 days but was open-ended."}],[{"start":84.10000000000001,"text":"The SpaceX chief executive’s post came during a quiet period that follows an IPO filing during which securities law restricts executives from making public statements about the business that go beyond what is in the document."}],[{"start":96.80000000000001,"text":"The shorter term Musk described casts doubt on the company’s portrayal of the deal being worth up to $45bn, which helped underpin SpaceX’s narrative as an AI cloud compute provider on Earth and someday in orbit."}],[{"start":111.05000000000001,"text":"The rocket maker in its prospectus said the deal “highlights the increasing importance of large-scale, frontier-level AI infrastructure” and positioned it “as a differentiated provider of high-performance compute capacity” to third parties as well as itself."}],[{"start":126.05000000000001,"text":"The filing does disclose that Anthropic’s agreement to use SpaceX’s huge “Colossus” data centre in Tennessee may be terminated by either party with 90 days’ notice."}],[{"start":136.55,"text":"In his X post, Musk suggested the deal could continue beyond 180 days. “SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years, although it’s possible that may be what happens,” he said."}],[{"start":147.8,"text":"The billionaire has a history of clashing with regulators over his social media posts. His tweets in 2018 about taking Tesla private led to Securities and Exchange Commission charges of making false statements, which the billionaire eventually settled for $20mn."}],[{"start":164,"text":"John Coates, a former acting director of the SEC’s corporate finance division and now a professor at Harvard Law School, said it was unlikely that SEC regulators would mind Musk’s social media posts during a quiet period."}],[{"start":178,"text":"The agency “shows no apparent interest in enforcing quiet periods, gun-jumping or any of the longstanding rules that have helped keep pump-and-dump schemes out of US capital markets,” he said."}],[{"start":188.5,"text":"SpaceX earlier this year absorbed Musk’s AI start-up xAI, which offers its own Grok models to compete with Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. "}],[{"start":199.2,"text":"To date, Grok’s usage has fallen far short of leading rivals. But it had success in rapidly setting up the Colossus facility at a time when AI labs are racing for more computing power."}],[{"start":211.89999999999998,"text":"Anthropic declined to comment. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment."}],[{"start":226.39999999999998,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1780023968_4221.mp3"}