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.
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Facts Only
* Anthropic explored an acquisition of Decart AI.
* Negotiations for the deal have ended.
* Initial reports in August valued the potential deal at approximately $6 billion.
* Decart AI raised $300 million in May in a round led by Radical Ventures.
* Investors in the May round included NVIDIA, Adobe Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, and Zeev Ventures.
* The May funding round valued Decart AI at nearly $4 billion.
* Decart AI was founded in 2023 by Dean, Orian Leitersdorf, and Moshe Shalev.
* Decart AI provides a chip-efficiency optimization stack and world models.
* Decart AI's Lucy model generates high-resolution video for virtual try-ons.
* eBay is an investor and customer of Decart AI.
* Anthropic is preparing for an initial public offering.
Executive Summary
Anthropic has walked away from a potential $6 billion acquisition of Decart AI after completing due diligence. While Decart is publicly recognized for its "world models" used in autonomous driving and e-commerce, Anthropic's primary interest was Decart's optimization stack, which aims to increase the efficiency of chips during training and inference to better handle compute demand.
The decision to terminate talks occurs as Anthropic prepares for an initial public offering intended to rival record-breaking listings. The acquisition would have represented a significant departure from Anthropic's history of small-scale acquisitions. While the technology offered a path to reduce the cost of serving customers, the high premium—roughly 50% over Decart's May valuation—may have been difficult to justify to future shareholders. It remains unclear if the deal failed due to the valuation or findings during the due diligence process. The two companies may still pursue a commercial partnership for the efficiency stack as a more cost-effective alternative to a full buyout.
Full Take
The strongest version of this narrative is a pragmatic corporate pivot: a pre-IPO company choosing balance-sheet discipline over a high-premium acquisition to ensure a smoother transition to public markets. It frames the failed deal as a rational trade-off between long-term infrastructure efficiency and short-term financial optics.
The narrative relies heavily on unnamed sources to bridge the gap between known events and internal motivations. Because the primary actors declined to comment, the "rationale" for the deal and the reasons for its collapse are presented as a logical deduction rather than a confirmed fact. This creates a cohesive story out of fragmented signals, though it remains speculative.
Patterns detected: none
The driving paradigm here is the "IPO Pressure Cooker." The assumption is that the scrutiny of public shareholders outweighs the strategic value of proprietary efficiency tools. This echoes the historical pattern of "window dressing," where private companies sanitize their spending and acquisition history immediately prior to listing to maximize valuation.
The implication is a shift toward "leasing" rather than "owning" critical infrastructure. If Anthropic opts for a commercial agreement over ownership, it signals a trend where AI giants prefer flexible operational expenses over heavy capital expenditures. This benefits the boutique efficiency providers who maintain their independence while securing massive corporate contracts.
Bridge Questions:
1. If the deal failed due to due diligence rather than price, what technical flaws in "chip-efficiency" stacks are common enough to kill a $6bn deal?
2. Would a successful acquisition have signaled a "compute crisis" for Anthropic, suggesting their current infrastructure was insufficient for their growth projections?
Counterstrike Scan:
An influence campaign seeking to manipulate Anthropic's stock sentiment would leak "failed deal" news to signal internal instability or a lack of confidence in their technical roadmap. The current content does not match this; it frames the decision as a disciplined financial move tied to a record-breaking IPO goal.