Rare Praise from Musk? Anthropic Hailed as Current AI Leader

According to a report by _Investing.com_, Elon Musk stated on Thursday (9th) that the AI startup company Anthropic is 'clearly' the current leader in the AI field. As global AI competition intensifies, Musk's public praise for a competitor is a rare occurrence.

Musk made the above comments in response to a post on the social platform X discussing the performance of various AI models, but he did not further explain the basis for his judgment.

Anthropic has rapidly risen in recent years to become one of the most representative developers in the AI field. Its Claude series models challenge OpenAI, Google, and xAI, which was founded by Musk. Claude is particularly popular among software engineers for AI-assisted program development.

Anthropic's rise accelerated at the end of last year. The company then launched the new-generation AI model Claude Opus 4.5, which received widespread acclaim for its outstanding programming capabilities. The model was quickly adopted by software developers and AI researchers. Many tech industry insiders even described themselves as 'Claude-pilled,' meaning they had completely switched to using Claude and no longer relied on other AI assistants.

Anthropic subsequently launched Claude Cowork, further expanding the product's application range. In addition to programmers, businesses and non-technical users can also use this tool to automate research, document writing, and daily office work. The launch of this product series further consolidated Anthropic's position as one of the fastest-growing AI companies globally, making it the most threatening competitor to OpenAI.

Anthropic secretly submitted IPO application documents to U.S. regulatory authorities in June. Just a few weeks before that, the company completed a new round of fundraising, with an enterprise valuation of approximately $96.5 billion, paving the way for what could become one of the largest IPOs in AI industry history.