Anthropic has decided against buying Israeli AI startup Decart AI after completing due diligence, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg, which published overnight into Tuesday. No agreement was signed. Representatives for both companies declined to comment.
Talks at about $6 billion were first reported in August with the same caveat — nothing finalized, and the deal could fall apart. It has. Secondary write-ups carrying the Bloomberg report, including CNBC-TV18 and The Next Web, say the companies may still pursue other ways to work together.
The acquisition rationale was compute efficiency, not Decart’s better-known world-model products. Decart’s optimization stack is meant to make chips work harder in training and inference so Anthropic’s existing capacity can absorb more demand. That framing matters ahead of Anthropic’s planned IPO: the company has been spending heavily on compute and rarely makes large acquisitions — its most notable to date was about $400 million for a small team, per TNW’s read of Bloomberg.
A $6 billion purchase would have been an order of magnitude larger. Decart raised $300 million in May in a Radical Ventures-led round that valued the company near $4 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time; $6 billion would have been roughly a 50% markup four months later. Founders include brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf with Moshe Shalev. Alongside the efficiency layer, Decart sells world-model video systems used in virtual try-on and live streaming, with eBay as both investor and customer.
Bloomberg and the secondary reports do not say whether Anthropic walked on price, diligence findings, or IPO optics. The open question is whether any leftover collaboration is a commercial license for the efficiency stack rather than ownership — the cheaper version of the same idea that would not need explaining in a prospectus.