Anthropic Walks Away From $6 Billion Decart Deal, Sources Say

Anthropic has decided against acquiring AI startup Decart AI, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. Anthropic had explored a deal and performed due diligence on Decart but ultimately walked away, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information, and one of them said the companies may still pursue other ways to collaborate. Representatives for both companies declined to comment. Bloomberg reported in August that the Claude chatbot maker had been in talks to buy Decart for about $6 billion, though nothing was finalized and the negotiations could have fallen apart. Decart makes software that lowers the cost of training and running AI by helping chips work more efficiently, and the mooted acquisition had been intended to help Anthropic's computing infrastructure absorb more demand. Anthropic, which rarely makes large acquisitions, has been spending heavily on computing power to develop new products and serve customers ahead of a highly anticipated initial public offering, in which it has sought to raise as much as SpaceX or more, according to people familiar with the preparations. Decart was founded in 2023 by three Israeli engineers — brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev — and offers an optimization stack meant to help developers squeeze maximum performance from every chip, both for training AI models and for inference. It also builds so-called world models that simulate the physical world for uses such as autonomous driving and e-commerce; its Lucy model can turn live video of a person into real-time, high-resolution footage that makes them appear to be trying on a dress or bag. eBay, an investor in Decart, is also a customer. Decart said in May it raised $300 million in a round led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Adobe Ventures joining alongside prior backers Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Zeev Ventures. The round valued Decart at almost $4 billion, up from $3.1 billion in August 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported. Chief Executive Officer Dean Leitersdorf said in July that Decart trains its AI on text and millions of hours of video to grasp real-world physics, and that its technology is used for live streaming on platforms including Twitch, TikTok and YouTube by influencers such as CodeMiko, as well as by advertising firms.