Anthropic Walks Away from $6bn Decart AI Deal After Completing Due Diligence

Anthropic has walked away from its $6bn Decart deal, Bloomberg reports

Due diligence was done and the answer was no. The target was chip efficiency rather than world models, at a large premium to Decart's May valuation. Anthropic has decided against buying Decart AI, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified. The company had explored a deal and completed due diligence before walking away, and one of those people said the two may still find other ways to work together. Representatives for both companies declined to comment to Bloomberg. The talks were first reported in August at around $6bn, with the same caveat attached even then: nothing had been finalised, and the negotiations could fall apart. They have. What Anthropic wanted is the detail that has been widely misread since the talks surfaced. Decart is known publicly for world models, but the acquisition rationale was efficiency. Its optimisation stack is designed to make chips work harder across both training and inference, and the idea, per Bloomberg, was to let Anthropic's existing compute absorb more demand. The company's own website promises to "squeeze every ounce of performance from every chip". This was a deal about the cost of serving customers, not about entering a new product category. That matters because of what Anthropic is doing next. The company rarely makes large acquisitions, and its most notable to date was $400m for a team of fewer than ten people. Six billion would have been an order of magnitude larger, and it comes while the company is spending heavily on compute ahead of an initial public offering it expects to match or exceed SpaceX's record listing, according to people who have described the preparations to Bloomberg. Buying a way to make existing infrastructure go further is a rational thing to want in that position. Paying a substantial premium for it, weeks before a listing, is a harder line to defend to incoming shareholders. Nobody involved has said which consideration ended the talks, and the reporting does not establish whether Anthropic balked at the price or at something diligence turned up. A company preparing to list has every reason to want its cost base looking efficient and its acquisition history looking disciplined, and those two impulses point in opposite directions here. Buying Decart would have improved the first and complicated the second. Decart raised $300m in May in a round led by Radical Ventures, with NVIDIA, Adobe Ventures, Valor Equity Partners and Atreides Management joining, alongside earlier backers Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Zeev Ventures. That round valued the company at close to $4bn, per the Wall Street Journal, up from $3.1bn the previous August. A $6bn purchase would have been roughly a 50% mark-up four months later. Founded in 2023 by the brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf with Moshe Shalev, Decart runs two businesses that sit unusually far apart. One is the chip-efficiency layer Anthropic was interested in. The other is world models, systems trained on text and millions of hours of video to internalise how physical objects behave, aimed at applications from autonomous driving to online retail. Its Lucy model takes live video of a person and generates high-resolution video of them wearing something they are not, which is the virtual try-on problem that has defeated fashion e-commerce for a decade. eBay is both an investor and a customer. Chief executive Dean Leitersdorf told Bloomberg at a conference in Paris in July that the technology is also used for live streaming on Twitch, TikTok and YouTube. Whether the collaboration the two sides are said to be still considering means a commercial agreement for that efficiency stack, rather than ownership of it, is the thing to watch. It would be the cheaper version of the same idea, and it would not need explaining in a prospectus.

Anthropic reportedly backs from $6bn Decart AI acquisition

The acquisition was expected to help Anthropic's compute infrastructure absorb its growing demand. Anthropic is backing away from talks to acquire Decart AI, a research start-up building technology that improves chip efficiency, Bloomberg news reported earlier today (8 September). The deal was expected to be worth around $6bn, significantly higher than Decart's reported nearly $4bn valuation following a $300m raise earlier this year. Backed by Nvidia, Benchmark, Adobe, Sequoia and Radical Ventures among others, Decart's AI infrastructure improves training and inferencing capacities of AI models. Its foundational model Lucy supposedly edits live video at the speed of stream, while its so-called 'world model' Oasis, designed for physical AI, generates realistic simulations to train robots. The acquisition was expected to help Anthropic's compute infrastructure absorb some of its growing demand. The AI giant, according to The Information, has signed some $517bn in compute capacity leases in just over the past 11 months, which amounts to some 14.8GW of capacity. The company also confirmed last month that it would be designing its own chips to circumvent the worldwide shortage in the technology and access a steady supply. Headquartered in California, Decart was founded in 2023 by former Israeli Defence Forces' intelligence unit soldiers; brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev. Its $300m May raise was led by Radical Ventures and its co-founder Jordan Jacobs, and brought Decart's total raise to more than $450m. Reports of the failed Decart acquisition come as Anthropic is expected to delay marketing its initial public offering prospectus to mid-October. The AI giant's highly anticipated public listing, investors hope, will make the largest debut in history, raising the company $75bn or more at a $2trn valuation. Last month, a US judge blocked the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic's products for government use, handing the AI company a major win ahead of its plans to go public. The company sued the US government in March after its refusal to lower guardrails on its AI models led to an abrupt 'supply chain risk' designation. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Anthropic acquisition: Anthropic drops pursuit of AI startup Decart

Anthropic has decided not to pursue an acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Decart AI, Bloomberg News reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. Here are some details: * Anthropic had ⁠explored ⁠a deal for Decart that Bloomberg News previously reported could be worth about $6 billion, but ultimately walked away after conducting due diligence, the report said. * The companies could still pursue other forms of collaboration, the report added. * ⁠Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Decart AI and Anthropic did not immediately ⁠respond to requests for comment outside business hours. * Reuters reported last month that Anthropic was in talks to acquire Nvidia-backed Decart as the Claude chatbot maker explored acquisitions that could help it handle growing demand ahead of a planned public listing. * Decart develops AI infrastructure and optimization technology and has built models including its Lucy live-video editing ⁠model and Oasis simulation platform.

Anthropic Scuttles Plans to Acquire AI Company Decart | PYMNTS.com

That's according to a report late Monday (Sept. 7) by Bloomberg News, citing sources familiar with the matter. Anthropic had been considering a deal and had conducted due diligence on Decart but ultimately chose not to pursue the acquisition, the sources said. PYMNTS has contacted Anthropic for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. Bloomberg had reported last month that Anthropic was in discussions to buy Decart, which makes chips work more to lessen the cost of training and operating artificial intelligence (AI). That report said the deal would have been Anthropic's largest to date, and a relatively rare acquisition for the Claude maker. It would also help the company's computing infrastructure keep pace with the surging adoption of its software. Decart also offers world models designed to simulate the physical world and help businesses with applications like autonomous driving and eCommerce. In eCommerce applications, the company's Lucy AI model lets customers virtually try on apparel and accessories. The Bloomberg report noted that Anthropic has been spending on computing power to build new products and serve consumers as it prepares to go public in what could be the largest initial public offering (IPO) ever. The company also recently released a set of blueprints for retailers for building AI agents to assist shoppers and help merchants with tasks like including inventory and pricing. This is happening as an increasing number of consumers use AI for shopping, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report "The Millennial Shopping Map: How AI, Search and Stores Compete Before Checkout." Research from that report found that while Google is still the most widely used product-discovery tool among millennials, at 57%, OpenAI's ChatGPT has moved into second place at 41%, ahead of Amazon at 37%, YouTube at 29%, and Instagram and Gemini, each of which came in at 26%. "The significance is less that artificial intelligence has displaced search, because it has not, than that it is competing with marketplaces and social platforms at the point where consumers narrow their choices," PYMNTS wrote Tuesday (Sept. 8). "That puts product discovery outside the merchant's own storefront earlier in the buying process." The research also illustrated why discovery should not be conflated with the transaction itself. Millennials shop using AI, traditional search, marketplaces, merchant apps and stores, with the mix changing depending on what they are buying.

Anthropic Drops 6B Decart AI Deal: What Went Wrong?

Anthropic abandoned plans to acquire Israeli startup Decart AI for roughly USD 6 billion, Bloomberg reported September 8. The Claude maker explored the acquisition in Israel, completed due diligence, then withdrew without finalizing the transaction. The decision ends a major AI acquisition effort as prepares for a potential public listing later this year. People familiar with the talks said undisclosed findings during due diligence influenced the decision to walk away. The proposed USD 6 billion Decart deal could have become Anthropic's largest known acquisition by a wide margin. Decart develops chip optimization software that helps reduce computing costs during AI training and inference workloads. The technology could have helped Anthropic handle rising AI demand without expanding computing resources at the same pace. Anthropic has instead continued investing heavily in computing capacity while developing products and preparing investors for its IPO. Decart raised USD 300 million in May, reaching a valuation of almost USD 4 billion after the funding round. Radical Ventures led the round, while Nvidia, Adobe Ventures, Atreides Management, and Valor Equity Partners participated. also develops world models and AI tools for demanding applications, including autonomous driving and e-commerce. Its optimization platform aims to help developers squeeze every ounce of performance from every chip, according to its website. The collapsed deal could push Decart toward fresh buyers, investors, or strategic partnerships following Anthropic's withdrawal. Both companies declined to comment, although future collaboration remains possible, according to people familiar with discussions. For Anthropic, the decision preserves financial flexibility while keeping attention on infrastructure expansion before its potential IPO. The move also highlights growing scrutiny around expensive AI acquisitions as companies balance computing costs, growth, and investor expectations.