Anthropic in Talks to Buy Decart for $6B

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, is reportedly lining up its biggest cheque yet, and the target is a two-year-old Israeli startup most people have never heard of.

Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Anthropic is in talks to buy Decart for around $6 billion. The usual caveats apply. The talks might not lead to a deal, and neither company would comment. But if it closes, it would be the largest acquisition in Anthropic’s history and its fifth of 2026 alone.

Table of Contents

Who is Decart

Decart was founded in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, who met in the Israeli military’s Unit 8200 signals-intelligence unit, and it employs about 100 people. The company does two things worth noting. It builds AI models that generate and edit interactive video in real time, and it has developed its own infrastructure and optimisation software for squeezing more work out of the expensive chips that train and run modern AI.

That second part is the interesting bit. Running large models is ferociously costly, and most of the bill is compute. A firm that can make the same chips do more is selling exactly what every AI lab is desperate for. It is less flashy than a chatbot, but it goes straight to the thing keeping finance directors awake. If the deal completes, Bloomberg reports Decart’s team would join Anthropic’s inference and performance group.

A rapidly rising price tag

Decart is not cheap, and it is getting less cheap by the month. In May it raised $300 million in a round led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Adobe Ventures joining in. That round valued the company at close to $4 billion, up from $3.1 billion the previous August. A $6 billion takeout would mark another sharp step up in barely a year.

The bigger picture

The timing is not an accident. Anthropic has been meeting potential investors as it weighs a possible move onto public markets this autumn, and it has been fielding questions about infrastructure spending and margins. Buying a company whose whole pitch is making AI compute cheaper reads like a direct answer to those questions. If your costs are dominated by GPU time, owning the team that makes chips go further is a sensible way to defend your economics before you open the books to public investors.

It also fits a pattern. This would be Anthropic’s fifth acquisition of the year, a sign that a lab once focused almost entirely on research is now buying capability at speed, the way the big platforms do. Whether $6 billion for a two-year-old startup looks clever or frothy depends entirely on how much compute it can actually save. For now it is talks, not ink. (Not investment advice.)

Did you know: Decart’s valuation climbed from about $3.1 billion to close to $4 billion in the space of a single year, and the mooted takeover would push it to $6 billion, all before the company’s third birthday.

Sources

The free stack. One email a week: the AI tools and moves that actually matter, hype filtered out. Subscribe free →