Anthropic in advanced talks to acquire Israeli AI startup Decart for $6 billion

Anthropic is in talks to acquire Israeli artificial intelligence startup Decart for about $6 billion. If the deal comes through, it would be the largest acquisition in Anthropic's history and would come as the Claude developer prepares for a major public offering while racing to expand computing capacity and make its AI models faster and more efficient.

Reuters reported that Decart's team could join Anthropic's inference and performance organization if a deal is completed.

However, talks are still at an early stage and could fall apart.

The reports also narrow the field of potential buyers that had emerged around Decart. Calcalist reported this week that Nvidia had held advanced negotiations to acquire the company before another major technology player entered the process. Amazon, Nebius and SpaceX were among the companies identified as potential buyers.

Elon Musk, however, has now said that SpaceX will not acquire Decart. Sources involved in Decart's negotiations had previously insisted to Calcalist that SpaceX was among the interested parties.

The Anthropic talks nevertheless confirm that Decart has attracted interest beyond the chip manufacturers and cloud companies with which it has worked since its founding. The attraction is largely tied to a problem confronting the entire AI industry - how to get more performance from increasingly expensive computing infrastructure.