Anthropic is in advanced talks to acquire the Israeli AI startup Decart for roughly $6 billion, Bloomberg reported late Wednesday, with Reuters separately confirming the discussions through a source familiar with the matter. It would be the Claude maker’s largest acquisition ever, and the timing is the story: Anthropic filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 1 and is targeting a Nasdaq debut as early as October.
The price implies a roughly 50% premium to the nearly $4 billion valuation Decart carried in May, when Radical Ventures led a $300 million round joined by Nvidia, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners and Adobe Ventures, alongside prior backers Sequoia, Benchmark and Zeev Ventures. The Wall Street Journal pegged that May mark. In August 2025, the company was worth $3.1 billion. Founded in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf, his brother Orian Leitersdorf, and Moshe Shalev, Decart has roughly doubled in paper value in a year.
The deal’s logic sits one layer beneath the headline number. Per Bloomberg’s source, Decart’s team would fold into Anthropic’s inference and performance organization, and the acquisition is intended to help Anthropic’s existing compute absorb more demand. Decart’s website describes its core product, DOS, as “a vertically integrated inference and training platform for real-time AI workloads, spanning hardware-aware model design, kernel tooling, proprietary compilers, and inference optimization.” Its public-facing models, Lucy (real-time video editing) and Oasis (simulated environments for robotics and autonomous-driving training), are essentially demos of that stack.
That’s what makes the sticker price legible. Anthropic is projected to spend around $19 billion on compute in 2026, and Gizmodo has pegged its payments to xAI for data-center capacity at $1.25 billion a month. Against that run-rate, a $6 billion bolt-on that meaningfully improves tokens-per-GPU is an operational hedge, not a moonshot. It’s also a story Anthropic can tell the S-1 readership: margins improve because we own the kernel layer.
There’s a subplot. On Monday, the Israeli paper Calcalist reported Decart was in advanced discussions at $6–7 billion and named SpaceX as the likely buyer. Elon Musk called it “fake news” on X. By Wednesday night, Bloomberg and Reuters had a different name on the term sheet.
The pattern is familiar from an earlier cycle: pre-IPO acquirers buying vertical infrastructure to make their gross-margin story legible to public markets. Anthropic isn’t hiding what game it’s playing. The S-1 is already at the SEC.
Sources
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-13/anthropic-said-in-talks-to-buy-ai-startup-decart-for-6-billion
- https://wincountry.com/2026/08/12/anthropic-in-talks-to-buy-decart-ai-source-says/
- https://fortune.com/2026/08/13/anthropic-said-in-talks-to-buy-startup-decart-for-6-billion/
- https://gizmodo.com/anthropic-is-reportedly-looking-to-buy-this-seemingly-un-anthropic-like-startup-2000798105
- https://www.techtimes.com/articles/324234/20260813/anthropic-talks-acquire-decart-6b-targeting-77-gross-margins-before-ipo.htm