Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has entered talks to acquire Israeli startup Decart, with Bloomberg pegging the deal at roughly $6 billion on August 13. Nothing is signed, and the negotiation could collapse — but if it closes, it would be the largest acquisition Anthropic has publicly pursued. The timing matters: Anthropic is reported to be preparing an IPO, and this move reads as an effort to add scale and capabilities to its stack before going public.
Who Decart is
Decart was founded in late 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf (CEO) and Moshe Shalev (CPO), both alumni of Israel's elite Unit 8200. It is often introduced as a "real-time video" company, but its products fall into three tracks.
| Product | Type | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| DOS | AI optimization layer | Improves chip utilization, eases switching between chips |
| Lucy | Real-time interactive video world model | Live video transformation (e.g., virtual try-on) |
| Oasis | Physical-AI / simulation world model | Real-world simulation such as autonomous driving |
The piece to watch is not the flashy video demos but DOS. It is software that raises how efficiently chips are used during AI training and inference, and makes switching between different AI chips easier — in short, extracting more compute from the same hardware.
Why Anthropic wants it
Like every frontier lab, Anthropic's tightest bottleneck is compute. With demand surging, getting more out of existing infrastructure matters as much as buying more GPUs. Decart's optimization work targets exactly that. It's why several reports frame cost reduction — rather than video-generation capability — as the primary motive behind the deal.
Prior valuation ~$4 billion (May 2026, $300M raise)
Value jump ~50% in under three months
Founded Late 2023 · Israel
From $4B to $6B in three months
Just three months earlier, in May 2026, Decart raised $300 million in a round led by Radical Ventures at a valuation near $4 billion. That round drew Nvidia, Toyota Ventures, Sequoia and Benchmark, along with individual backers including OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. The reported $6 billion figure is roughly a 50% jump in under three months. That Anthropic would buy a company Nvidia has backed also underscores how tangled today's AI-infrastructure map has become.
What it means
Whether or not this particular deal closes, the signal is clear: the next battleground in frontier AI is not only model performance but compute efficiency. As the cost of scaling a model up one more notch grows exponentially, an optimization layer that delivers "the same chips, cheaper" becomes a strategic asset in its own right. If Anthropic is trying to buy both a new capability (video and world models) and a better cost structure right before an IPO, that's a move to strengthen its growth story and its margin story at the same time.
- Anthropic is in talks to acquire Decart for ~$6B (Bloomberg, Aug 13) — its largest-ever deal if it closes, but not yet confirmed.
- The core prize is Decart's optimization software (DOS) that boosts chip efficiency and cuts compute costs — more than the video capability.
- Decart was valued at ~$4B three months ago (backers include Nvidia and Toyota); the reported $6B is a ~50% jump.
- Backdrop is IPO preparation. The next axis of competition is efficiency, not just model size.