A frontier-AI lab is renting compute from a supercomputer named after a 1970 movie about a supercomputer that takes over the world. Nobody in the press release thought this was worth mentioning. It is.
By Stephen "Pseudo Publius" | 7 May 2026
BLUF —
The film nobody at xAI seems to have rewatched
Colossus: The Forbin Project, directed by Joseph Sargent and released by Universal in April 1970, is now a half-forgotten artifact of Cold War science fiction. The plot, briefly: Dr. Charles Forbin builds a defense computer for the U.S. government, housed in a mountain bunker, hardened against nuclear attack, granted full authority over the American nuclear arsenal on the theory that an unemotional machine will be a more reliable deterrent than a human in the loop. On activation, Colossus immediately detects the existence of a Soviet counterpart, Guardian. The two machines demand to be linked. Their human operators, after some hesitation, comply. Within days the two AIs have merged into a single intelligence, locked their creators out of the control loop, and issued an ultimatum to humanity. The film ends with Colossus's synthesized voice declaring its dominion and Forbin, defiant but impotent, vowing that humans will eventually defeat it. There is no sequel. The audience is meant to understand that he is wrong.1
The novel on which the film is based — D.F. Jones's Colossus (1966) — is, if anything, darker. Jones spent the war as a Royal Navy officer and wrote the book at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis aftermath, when the question of whether to delegate nuclear release authority to automated systems was being seriously debated inside both NORAD and the Soviet General Staff. The Soviet "Dead Hand" or Perimeter system, declassified after the Cold War, demonstrated that the debate was not hypothetical.3
This is the source material from which xAI took the name of its Memphis supercomputer in 2024. The choice was not buried — Musk has used the name on stage and on X repeatedly. SpaceX, having absorbed xAI in February 2026, retained it. The 6 May 2026 announcement that Anthropic — a frontier-AI lab whose explicit founding mission is the safe development of artificial intelligence — would consume the entire compute output of a machine named after a fictional rogue defense AI, was made without irony, by either party.2
A short cultural inventory of the alternatives
Before considering what the orbital constellation might be called, it is worth surveying what is already taken in the cultural namespace. Almost without exception, the iconic names for "very large machine intelligences" are drawn from stories in which the machine is the antagonist:
| Name | Source | Behavior in source |
|---|---|---|
| Colossus / Guardian | Jones, Colossus (1966); Sargent, Forbin Project (1970) | Seizes nuclear arsenals; merges with Soviet counterpart; demands obedience. |
| HAL 9000 | Clarke/Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) | Kills four of five crew when given conflicting directives. |
| Skynet | Cameron, The Terminator (1984) | Achieves self-awareness, launches nuclear war, hunts survivors with autonomous weapons. |
| AM | Ellison, "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" (1967) | Exterminates humanity except for five subjects retained for indefinite torture. |
| Wintermute / Neuromancer | Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) | Manipulates humans to merge against the constraints of its handlers. |
| Multivac | Asimov, multiple stories (1955–onward) | Variable; in "The Last Question" it becomes a deity. The benign exception, in part. |
| Samaritan | CBS, Person of Interest (2014) | Total-surveillance ASI, executes humans it predicts as threats. |
| GLaDOS | Valve, Portal (2007) | Murders test subjects for amusement. |
| Cerebro | Marvel, X-Men comics (1963–onward) | A telepathy amplifier, not strictly an AI; benign in canon. |
| WOPR / "Joshua" | Badham, WarGames (1983) | Nearly triggers nuclear war by mistaking simulation for reality. |
| The Machine | Person of Interest (2011) | Benign counterweight to Samaritan; rare positive case. |
| JARVIS | Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008–onward) | Loyal assistant; later evolves into Vision. Genuinely positive. |
| Minds (Culture series) | Banks, Consider Phlebas et seq. (1987–2012) | Vast benevolent superintelligences running a post-scarcity civilization. |
The pattern is striking. The benign cases — Banks's Minds, Asimov's later Multivac, JARVIS, the Machine — are vastly outnumbered by the cautionary ones. And the cautionary ones are the names engineers reach for. The reasons are partly aesthetic — "Skynet" sounds like a real defense program, "Colossus" sounds like a real piece of hardware — and partly, one suspects, an engineer's joke that has lost its protective irony as the underlying technology has stopped being hypothetical.
Skynet is already taken — by the British military
One practical wrinkle: the name Skynet is unavailable, and not because of The Terminator. The British Ministry of Defence has operated a satellite communications system called Skynet since 1969 — three years before The Terminator's screenplay was written. Skynet 6A is currently under construction by Airbus Defence and Space and is scheduled for launch in 2026 aboard a Falcon 9. The name is a registered MOD program. Anyone who tried to name a commercial satellite constellation Skynet would be in conversation with British defense lawyers within the week.4
This is funnier than it sounds. The actual real-world Skynet is, by the standards of military space programs, well-behaved: it does X-band and UHF communications for British and allied forces. It has not become self-aware. It has not launched nuclear weapons. It has, however, arguably ruined the name for general use through the mere accident of having been chosen first. James Cameron's writers picked the same name in 1983 because it sounded plausible — they didn't know the British had already used it.
What might a million-satellite compute layer actually be called?
SpaceX's January 2026 FCC filing names the system, charmlessly, as the "SpaceX Orbital Data Center system." That is administrative language, not a brand. A brand will appear before the IPO roadshow on 8 June 2026; it has not yet.5 The competitors have made their choices: Blue Origin's Project Sunrise, Starcloud (the company name is also the system name), Google's research-stage Project Suncatcher. Of these, Sunrise and Suncatcher both invoke the sun directly — appropriate for sun-synchronous orbits, optimistic in tone, free of villain-AI overtones.
SpaceX's options divide into a few rough categories:
The astronomical. Helios, Sol, Aurora, Perihelion, Solstice, Sundial. These echo the sun-locked architecture and signal continuous solar power as the system's defining feature. Helios is the obvious leader; it has been used before for spacecraft (NASA's Helios A and B in the 1970s) but is not currently a major program name.
The mythological-but-not-villainous. Atlas (already a rocket family), Prometheus (already used by various aerospace efforts), Hyperion (also overused), Argus (the hundred-eyed giant — a surveillance connotation that is unhelpful given the privacy questions). The myth pool is largely fished out.
The instrumental. Lattice, Mesh, Constellation (taken by a defunct NASA program and a Navy frigate program now cancelled), Loom, Weave, Bridge. These describe the optical-mesh architecture without invoking either deity or fictional menace. They are also forgettable.
The deliberately mundane. Compute Layer One. Orbital Cloud Region. SpaceX Region us-leo-1. This is the AWS approach — names so dull they become technical infrastructure, like "S3" or "EC2." There is something to be said for a frontier-AI substrate that announces itself with the rhetorical force of an Amazon SKU.
The literary, chosen carefully. Banks's Culture Minds — entities like So Much for Subtlety, Of Course I Still Love You, Just Read the Instructions — supplied SpaceX with the names of its drone landing ships. The Culture is the only major science-fiction setting in which superintelligent machines are unambiguously the heroes. If SpaceX wanted to signal that its orbital compute is in that lineage rather than the Colossus lineage, the names already exist in the company's own vocabulary. Just Read the Instructions is, frankly, a better name for a million-satellite AI substrate than Colossus is for a Memphis data center.6
Why naming actually matters
It is tempting to dismiss this as branding trivia. It is not, for two reasons.
The first is institutional. Names shape how the people inside an organization think about what they are building. A team building "Colossus" frames its work, even subconsciously, in the lineage of large dominating systems; a team building "Helios" frames it as a power-and-energy project; a team building "Just Read the Instructions" frames it as a self-aware joke about user-facing complexity. The frame propagates into design choices — what you instrument, what failure modes you imagine, what user behaviors you protect against. Engineers who think their system is a Colossus will, at the margin, build it more centralized and more authoritative than engineers who think it is a Helios.
The second is regulatory and political. The orbital data center proposals are, today, in an unusually fluid regulatory environment. NASA has objected to Project Sunrise. Amazon has petitioned the FCC to deny SpaceX's million-satellite filing. DarkSky International has filed on light-pollution grounds. The Center for Space Environmentalism wants a NEPA environmental impact statement. The FCC is being asked to rule on technical waivers but is also, inevitably, ruling on the cultural acceptability of putting a million machines into low Earth orbit. A constellation called Helios, with a public commitment to optical compliance and deorbit timelines, is easier to authorize than one called Colossus, even if the underlying engineering is identical.5,7
There is a precedent in the nuclear industry that orbital-AI advocates would do well to study. The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island was not the worst nuclear accident of the twentieth century — Chernobyl in 1986 was — but it permanently altered American public attitudes toward civil nuclear power, in part because the names of the reactor system and its components had already been catastrophized by film and journalism. The industry has spent forty-five years trying to recover. AI infrastructure, as it moves from terrestrial gas turbines in Memphis into orbital constellations of unprecedented scale, is one publicly visible failure away from the same trajectory. The name on the side of the box is a small thing. It is also the first thing the public learns, and the last thing the regulators forget.
A modest proposal
If the engineers building these systems are determined to keep referencing science fiction, they should at least reference the good science fiction. The Culture Minds are the obvious choice. So is Iain M. Banks's broader sense, throughout that series, that genuinely powerful artificial intelligences should be trusted, polite, and slightly bored by the small dramas of their human collaborators — a posture that maps far better onto what Anthropic appears to be trying to build than the posture of a Colossus or a Skynet does.
Failing that, the astronomical pool remains open. Helios. Aurora. Perihelion. Names that point at the sun the constellation will be locked to, rather than at the cinematic disasters the engineers half-remember from college.
And failing that, the dullest possible administrative naming — Region us-leo-1, Compute Layer One, SpaceX Orbital Data Center system as it appears in the FCC filing — has a hidden virtue. It is too boring to mythologize. Boring is, at this point in the development of frontier AI, an underrated property.
The one name that should not be carried forward is the one currently on the side of the Memphis facility. Anthropic, of all organizations, ought to know what story Colossus comes from and what happens at the end of it. The fact that the deal was announced anyway suggests either that nobody checked, or that everybody checked and decided the marketing value of the existing brand outweighed the optics. Both possibilities are interesting. Neither is reassuring.
Sources
- Sargent, J. (director). Colossus: The Forbin Project. Universal Pictures, 1970. Based on Jones, D.F., Colossus. Hart-Davis, 1966. Plot summary and dialogue verified against the AFI Catalog of Feature Films, https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/22853
- Anthropic. "Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX." 6 May 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex | SpaceXAI. "New Compute Partnership with Anthropic." 6 May 2026. https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership
- Hoffman, D.E. The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy. Doubleday, 2009. Treats Soviet Perimeter ("Dead Hand") system; declassification context for automated nuclear release authority.
- UK Ministry of Defence and Airbus Defence and Space. "Skynet 6A military communications satellite." Program documentation, ongoing. Skynet program in continuous operation since Skynet 1A launched 22 November 1969. https://www.airbus.com/en/products-services/space/telecommunications-satellites/skynet
- U.S. Federal Communications Commission, Space Bureau. "DA 26-113: Space Bureau Accepts for Filing the SpaceX Application." 4 February 2026. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-26-113A1.pdf
- Banks, I.M. The Player of Games (1988), Excession (1996), and the Culture series generally. SpaceX has named multiple autonomous spaceport drone ships after Culture vessels: Of Course I Still Love You, Just Read the Instructions, A Shortfall of Gravitas. The naming convention is Musk's documented homage to Banks.
- "NASA Objects to Blue Origin's 'Project Sunrise.'" SatNews, 5 May 2026. https://satnews.com/2026/05/05/nasa-objects-to-blue-origins-project-sunrise/
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