Anthropic Is SpaceX’s Biggest Customer, For Now -- AI Brief October 30

Good day %%first_name%%. Anthropic turns out to be SpaceX’s biggest customer, and it can leave on 90 days’ notice. OpenAI backed off a price cut, a bank runs its own coding model, and Google and Microsoft are splitting on how to charge for agents. But first, a quick plug for the new podcast episode below.

New on the podcast, episode 3: novelist Justin Feinstein wrote Your Behavior Will Be Monitored, a novel about an ad guy hired to teach a bot how to market to people inside a company where the bots watch the employees. He figured that world was five to ten years away. Then it started happening before the book was out. We get into the cookie data that knows too much (including the custom Oreo ads that showed up 15 minutes after an email), why he drives differently around Waymos, how to spot AI writing, and the wave of AI-powered crime he is writing about next. Listen to episode 3 → Follow the show in any app: pod.link/6785740580.

Anthropic Is SpaceX’s Biggest Customer, For Now Bloomberg

* What happened: Bloomberg reports that “Customer B,” the unnamed client behind about 34.5% of SpaceX’s third-quarter revenue, is Anthropic, citing a person familiar with the matter. The money flows to SpaceX’s AI division, now called Super Intelligence, which supplies computing power. Bloomberg’s headline puts the deal at $3 billion a month.

* Why it matters: Anthropic’s IPO filing, which Yahoo Finance covered, says it agreed to spend up to $120.5 billion with SpaceX’s AI arm over terms into 2029, about $3.1 billion a month once all the capacity arrives in December. Once the initial non-cancelable periods end in early 2027, either side can cancel with 90 days’ notice, Gizmodo notes. Earlier this week we covered Anthropic opening its books. This is the next chapter.

* What everyone’s saying: Yahoo Finance reads the deal as proof that SpaceX’s AI compute business is durable. Gizmodo’s angle is the size: the filing shows the SpaceX agreement is tens of billions of dollars bigger than the $84.5 billion earlier reports had suggested.

* My read between the lines: “Durable” and “cancel on 90 days’ notice” are doing a lot of work in the same story. SpaceX’s biggest customer can leave in a quarter, and the landlord also builds Grok, a rival to Claude. Colossus is a very expensive apartment building with one big tenant and a very short notice clause.

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OpenAI Scraps Its ChatGPT Pro Cut The Decoder

* What happened: OpenAI doubled the Work and Codex usage quotas on its Pro 100 and Pro 500 plans. On Pro 200 it doubled the lower quota and reversed a planned cut after user pushback, The Decoder reports. The Plus plan stays the same, and new and existing subscribers get the new quotas automatically.

* Why it matters: On these plans the usage allowance is the real price. The $200 sticker never moved, but what you got for it changed, and then changed back. OpenAI’s own caveat: doubling a quota does not mean twice as many finished tasks, because consumption varies by model, task type and settings.

* What everyone’s saying: The Decoder frames it as a race with Anthropic, which is preparing its IPO, with both companies competing hard for business customers. OpenAI says it will keep shipping efficiency gains and points to its new 6.1 models, Terra and Sol, which The Decoder says are much more efficient while matching or beating their predecessors.

* My read between the lines: When a plan sells by the quota, cutting the quota is cutting the product, and customers noticed in about a month. Watch the wording too. A bigger allowance is a promise about a number, not about your Tuesday.

📖 Further reading: Claude Is Burning Through Your Limit Faster Than Ever. Anthropic Won’t Tell You Why. — Allowances are the battleground now, and this one covers how usage limits get eaten and how to stretch yours.

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