Image: Decart / decart.ai Anthropic in Talks to Acquire Decart AI for $6 Billion
Anthropic is negotiating to buy Israeli startup Decart, which makes software that cuts the cost of running AI on chips. The deal would be Anthropic's largest acquisition to date.
Anthropic is in talks to acquire Decart, an Israeli AI startup, for approximately $6 billion, according to Bloomberg. If it closes, the deal would be Anthropic’s largest acquisition ever and its fifth in 2026.
Both companies declined to comment. The negotiations are ongoing and could fall through.
What Decart actually does
The company is best known outside AI circles for Oasis, a generative video demo it released in late 2024 that simulates Minecraft in real time. But video was the attention-grabber, not the core product.
Decart’s primary work is chip efficiency. The startup builds software that extracts more compute from existing hardware — reducing the electricity and cost required to train and run AI models. In a market where inference costs increasingly determine who can deploy what, that kind of efficiency software is becoming strategic infrastructure.
The company was founded in 2023 by three Israeli engineers: Dean Leitersdorf, Orian Leitersdorf, and Moshe Shalev. It raised $300 million from Radical Ventures in May 2026 at a roughly $4 billion valuation. The proposed $6 billion deal represents a 50% premium on that.
Why Anthropic wants it
Anthropic is preparing for what could be a very large IPO — reports from earlier in August pointed to a possible $2 trillion target valuation for an anticipated fall offering, after the company’s confidential S-1 filing in June. Revenue was reported to have exceeded $47 billion annualized as of May.
At that scale, compute costs are a major variable. Decart’s chip efficiency software could help Anthropic absorb growing inference demand without proportional infrastructure expansion. The acquisition is essentially about margin before going public.
The Decart team would join Anthropic’s inference and performance organization.
A competitive bid
Anthropic wasn’t the only company interested. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia, SpaceX, and Amazon also expressed interest in acquiring Decart, which signals how valuable computational efficiency has become as a standalone asset. It’s no longer just a supporting capability — companies are willing to pay acquisition premiums specifically for it.
At $6 billion, Anthropic would be paying significantly more than any of its previous deals. The bet is that owning Decart’s efficiency stack pays off in reduced infrastructure costs at scale, and that getting there before the IPO makes the math work even better.
Sources: The Next Web, Fortune, Bloomberg