Love the curiosity. I recommend you spend that curiosity on figuring out why both companies are in the situation they are that this deal is a win-win: Elon has provided a masterclass in public company launch and management over the last 15 years. (And in recent years done it amidst an incredibly divisive reputational environment).

Put another way - they could maybe try to do this. But it would be worth literally nothing compared to the actual benefits to SX of this deal. And add an immense amount of risk. There’s much more clever and interesting things to do.

No. Model weights are encrypted. Elon is doing this because Anthropic is desperate for compute, SpaceX needs to juice up its balance sheet before IPO, and xAI model team isn't competitive.

The model weights, sure he can "steal" them. But do what then? Serve it on the side?

Even distillation would be obvious.

And I wouldn't be surprised Anthropic is running the smaller inference models, keeping the base large model in machines they fully control/own.

SpaceX's data centre business is much more valuable than Grok, so this wouldn't make sense.