Elon Musk accused Anthropic's Claude AI of racial and demographic bias hours after the startup announced a $30 billion funding round that valued it at $380 billion. The Tesla CEO labeled the company "misanthropic and evil" in a Thursday social media post that drew over one million views.
Musk's criticism targeted specific groups he claims Claude discriminates against. "Your AI hates Whites & Asians, especially Chinese, heterosexuals and men," he wrote on X. "This is misanthropic and evil. Fix it."
The attack came as Anthropic revealed its Series G financing led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and investment firm Coatue. Additional participants included D.E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX, with Microsoft and Nvidia contributing previously announced investments.
Anthropic now holds the second-largest private tech valuation behind OpenAI's $500 billion. The company reported $14 billion in annualized revenue, representing more than tenfold growth year over year for three consecutive years. Claude Code alone surpassed $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue, doubling since the start of 2026.
Musk's xAI competes directly with Anthropic through its Grok chatbot. The timing coincides with reported departures of more than a dozen senior researchers from xAI between February 3 and 11, including co-founders Jimmy Ba and Yuhuai "Tony" Wu.
This marks the latest escalation in tensions between Musk and Anthropic. Reports from January indicated Anthropic blocked xAI's access to Claude models. Musk responded at the time by calling the move a "helpful motivator" for xAI while suggesting it would damage Anthropic's reputation.
The billionaire also referenced Anthropic's name in his criticism.
"Frankly, I don't think there is anything you can do to escape the inevitable irony of Anthropic ending up being Misanthropic," he wrote. "You were doomed to this fate when you chose your name."
Anthropic, led by CEO Dario Amodei, develops the Claude family of large language models that compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. The company emphasizes AI safety through its "constitution" approach to model alignment.
The $380 billion valuation reflects intense investor confidence in leading AI developers despite growing scrutiny over potential bias in machine learning systems. Anthropic's funding round ranks among the largest private technology investments in history, trailing only OpenAI's $40 billion SoftBank-led round last year.
Musk maintains ongoing feuds with multiple AI competitors. He has repeatedly criticized OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015 before leaving its board in 2018. Last month, he warned followers not to use ChatGPT, citing posts linking the chatbot to nine deaths including five suicides.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired back by pointing to reports of more than 50 deaths linked to Tesla's Autopilot. The exchange highlighted broader industry tensions as companies race for enterprise AI dominance while addressing safety and bias concerns.
Anthropic stated it will allocate the new capital toward research initiatives, product development, and infrastructure improvements. The company highlighted its position as a leader in enterprise artificial intelligence and coding solutions, with Claude models available on Amazon Web Services Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Azure.
Market data shows OpenAI and Google continue to dominate global generative AI traffic, while xAI maintains a smaller market presence despite Musk's high-profile involvement.
The AI industry faces increasing pressure to address fairness and safety in products as adoption expands across business applications.
Anthropic's rapid revenue growth demonstrates commercial demand for advanced AI capabilities. Enterprise clients and developers have adopted Claude models for various business applications and coding tasks, with the company's Claude Code now authoring an estimated 4% of all public GitHub commits worldwide.
