Read time: 4min
This week, Daniel Gershenson and Enduring Planet publicly cancelled Anthropic.
The trigger: Anthropic just signed to lease 100% of xAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. The same xAI being sued by the NAACP and Earthjustice for operating 27 unpermitted methane gas turbines next door at Colossus 2.
Those turbines have potential annual emissions of more than 1,700 tons of NOx.
To put that in human terms: it’s the smog-forming pollution of roughly 1.8 million extra passenger cars running for a year. Triple the vehicle fleet of metro Memphis. Sitting in one spot. Next to Black neighborhoods Memphis already calls an “asthma capital.”
The Boxtown neighborhood next to Colossus 1 has a cancer risk four times the national average.
Anthropic, the lab built explicitly as the “responsible alternative” to xAI, just became its customer.
That hits different.
One precision worth keeping
Most takes online conflate Colossus 1 and 2. They are not the same.
Anthropic is renting Colossus 1, which now runs on 15 permitted turbines after xAI was forced to remove its illegal ones last year.
Colossus 2, with the 27 unpermitted turbines, is the active lawsuit. xAI still runs it.
Does that absolve Anthropic? Not really. They are paying the same operator, propping up the same playbook, and deepening Musk’s revenue runway weeks before his $1.5T SpaceX IPO.
But precision separates analysis from outrage.
My honest takes
On Anthropic. Slightly heartbroken. Of all the labs, this one talked the loudest about responsibility. Watching them sign with Musk’s operation, weeks after losing a Pentagon AI deal to xAI, feels like watching the principled kid join the club they used to critique.
On Musk. I genuinely do not understand the 180. The man who built Tesla to save the planet is now powering Grok with illegal gas turbines and not giving a s*** about any environmental concern anymore.
On all of us. Easy to point at Anthropic. I use Claude every day. So does most of my circle. We are not innocent. The pace of adoption is producing something I see weekly: full-blown AI psychosis. Founders glued to chat windows at 2am. That is another post.
The bigger picture
I built the AI Infrastructure Map precisely to track this. Mega projects. Power deals. Picks and shovels.
The pattern is clear.
The US AI buildout is hyperconcentrated. Mega companies, mega capex, mega externalities. Communities absorb the cost. Regulators play catch-up. Lawsuits arrive years late.
China is doing the opposite. Electrifying everything at home. Exporting electrons to the world. Wrote about it last week.
The US is playing supply-side bullying. China is playing infrastructure.
In 10 years, we will know which bet aged better.
On switching to Gemini
I respect EP’s move. I do not think I will follow yet.
Claude remains the best tool in my stack. I have not seen evidence Gemini is meaningfully cleaner. Look at Google’s own AI infrastructure build-out (same gigawatts, same haste, same grid pressure). The 24/7 carbon-free pledge by 2030 is real but unproven.
The hard truth: there is no clean AI tool right now. Only degrees of damage.
Final thought
The Anthropic-xAI deal is not the scandal. It is the symptom.
When the most safety-conscious lab in the industry signs with the operator suing residents for clean air, the “responsible AI” framing is officially exhausted.
The next chapter of this story will not be written by labs.
It will be written by the communities living next to the turbines, the regulators finally waking up, and the founders willing to build the electron infrastructure that doesn’t require asthma capitals to run.
—Yoann
Quick note: half my portfolio is now using Claude Fundraiser to prep for the May-June raise window. If you missed how I ran a $2M raise through it, that one is gold. Promo code CODE20 for readers here.
Sponsor slots: I run a small number of brand collaborations each quarter with companies, tools, and VCs aligned with this climate audience. Past campaigns and results here.
Oh no I've followed you to Claude:( thanks for the update Yoann 🙏✨️
hard to decouple my business activities from Claude from now on... and I have the feeling that this dependency is here to stay and will only accentuate.
I get your feeling on energy bill and damages. not seeing a reversal anytime soon