Anthropic walks away from $6B

1/ Anthropic has walked away from talks to buy Decart AI after exploring a deal that Bloomberg had previously reported at about $6 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The companies may still look at other forms of collaboration. (finance.yahoo.com) 2/ Why Decart mattered: Decart sells infrastructure and models aimed at making AI systems run faster and more efficiently. On its site, the company says its Decart Optimization Stack works across Nvidia GPUs, AWS Trainium and Google TPU hardware. (decart.ai) 3/ The original logic for Anthropic was straightforward. Bloomberg reported on August 13 that Anthropic was in talks to buy Decart for about $6 billion in what would have been its largest known acquisition. Bloomberg’s reporting said Decart’s software could reduce the cost of training and operating AI by helping chips work more efficiently. (bloomberg.com) 4/ In other words, this was not just an acqui-hire story. Decart sits in a part of the stack that matters to model companies facing heavy compute demand: inference speed, hardware utilization and the ability to run across multiple chip platforms. Decart says DOS is built to “unlock the full performance of every major chip.” (bloomberg.com) 5/ Decart had also become expensive very quickly. The Israeli startup raised $300 million in May 2026 at a roughly $4 billion valuation, with Radical Ventures leading the round and Nvidia participating as a new investor, according to Globes and TechCrunch. (en.globes.co.il) 6/ That helps explain the price discussion. A $6 billion acquisition would have represented a sizable step-up from Decart’s May valuation only a few months later. Bloomberg had described the contemplated deal as Anthropic’s biggest known acquisition. (bloomberg.com) 7/ Nvidia’s role is one of the more telling details. Globes reported that before the Anthropic talks, Decart’s founders had rejected a higher offer from Nvidia and preferred Anthropic’s stock-based proposal because they were anticipating an Anthropic IPO. (en.globes.co.il) 8/ That detail matters because Nvidia was not an outside bystander. It was already a Decart investor through the May financing round, even though Decart’s pitch includes helping customers run AI workloads beyond Nvidia’s own hardware stack. (en.globes.co.il) 9/ Decart’s public materials also show why strategic buyers would care. The company markets low-latency and real-time AI systems, including live video products and “world models,” alongside infrastructure for faster inference. Its Cogito page says its LLM inference API offers “1,000+ tps endpoints” for latency-sensitive agents. (decart.ai) 10/ What changed? The public reporting is narrow. Bloomberg’s account, as cited by Yahoo Finance and Globes, says Anthropic explored the acquisition, conducted due diligence and then decided not to pursue it. Neither source, in the excerpts available, gives a public explanation from Anthropic for the reversal. (finance.yahoo.com) 11/ The one concrete clue on what comes next is that the door does not appear fully closed. Globes, citing Bloomberg, said Anthropic and Decart could still work together in other ways, including a possible customer or investment relationship instead of a full takeover. (en.globes.co.il) 12/ So the clean read is this: Anthropic appears to have decided that owning Decart outright was not the deal it wanted to finish, even after serious talks and diligence. But the underlying asset Decart built — faster, cross-chip AI infrastructure — is still the same one that drew interest from Anthropic and, reportedly, Nvidia. (finance.yahoo.com)