Revealing move on both sides I think.
This also tells us that Anthropic is feeling the heat from OpenAI and they need to secure capacity at almost any cost to cash in on their current product edge. If their lead with Opus 4.7 and Claude Code against GPT-5.5 and Codex were bigger, they could keep throttling capacity and wouldn't need expensive deals like this one.
xAI valued the cash from this deal more than the valuation upside of using that capacity for their own training or inference. So either Anthropic paid a huge premium, or xAI doesn't rate its own chances in this race very highly.
Probably the latter IMHO. And now that xAI is folded into SpaceX, xAI doesn't really need to defend its own valuation anymore. It's a compute and AI know-how business inside SpaceX, where renting GPUs out for cash is rational, even if it'd read as a confession from a standalone frontier lab.