Nobody quite saw last week’s deal between Anthropic and xAI coming, but as soon as it was announced, it was suddenly overdetermined. *Of course* Anthropic needed access to xAI’s enormous Colossus data center. *Obviously* the relatively uncompetitive and unpopular offerings from xAI made turning the company into a neo-cloud provider a smart choice for Elon Musk. Dario Amodei, the theory-minded essayist and Anthropic CEO, needed to stop his product from breaking down on a weekly basis. It just makes sense. This is all true, but again, an Anthropic-xAI collab wasn’t the sort of thing people were talking about two weeks ago and for plenty of good reasons, writes tech columnist John Herrman. “As much as their mutual dislike and misaligned business interests make this a strange deal, toxic interpersonal dynamics offer the clearest and best explanation for why it happened: As much as they don’t trust one another, they trust OpenAI’s Sam Altman less.” Amodei left OpenAI to start Anthropic over differences with Altman. Today, “Anthropic knows that its current advantages over OpenAI are thin and potentially fleeting, and Amodei, perhaps perceiving Musk as a less credible threat to his business than Altman in the medium term, could use some help.” Read Herrman’s full column: