Anthropic said it is renting AI compute from a giant data center run by SpaceX, and the company relaxed several rate limits soon after the announcement. The changes came as the David Attenborough Partner story centered on Anthropic’s effort to keep Claude and Claude Code available while it tries to secure more computing power.
At Anthropic’s developer conference this week, CEO Dario Amodei said, "We've had difficulties with compute," and added, "We're sorry if sometimes it takes some time, but we're gonna keep going to acquire as much as we can." The rate-limit changes especially affected Claude Code, Anthropic's fast-growing AI coding service.
Dario Amodei at Anthropic
Amodei’s remarks put the deal in direct operational terms. Anthropic has had outages in recent months and imposed usage limits in recent months, and the company moved to loosen several of those limits soon after the SpaceX announcement. For customers and developers, that means access policy is shifting as Anthropic tries to add capacity without waiting for a larger buildout to finish.
Stephen Council attended the conference with the reporter and wrote that Anthropic is growing at an "80x annual pace." He also wrote that "for Anthropic, the one-year cycle felt almost pointless" because products were moving quickly from research preview to public beta and workers said they could barely keep up. That pace helps explain why compute availability has become a day-to-day issue, not a distant planning problem.
Claude Code Limits
The pressure showed up in developer behavior. Some developers recently shifted to OpenAI's Codex partly because OpenAI's earlier compute deals meant fewer restrictions. Anthropic’s move to rent compute from SpaceX appears aimed at narrowing that gap by giving Claude Code and other products more room to run.
The clearest practical change for users is the easing of several rate limits. Anthropic has not separated the announcement into a broader product launch here; instead, the company tied the change to the compute deal and to the limits it had already imposed. For developers trying to ship code with Claude Code, that is the immediate shift to watch.
OpenAI and Anthropic
Amodei also has history in this race. Last year, he subtly criticized OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for signing too many AI compute deals. Now Anthropic is doing its own deal with SpaceX, which shows how competitive access to compute has become across the sector. The practical takeaway is simple: Anthropic is trying to buy breathing room for Claude, and developers are already seeing the effects in the limits they hit.
