Anthropic Reportedly Walks Away From $6 Billion Decart Acquisition After Due Diligence

Anthropic has reportedly decided against acquiring artificial intelligence startup Decart after completing due diligence on a deal discussed at around $6 billion, ending a potential takeover focused on AI compute efficiency, although the companies may still explore other ways to collaborate.

 

TL;DR

 

• Bloomberg reports that Anthropic walked away from acquiring Decart after conducting due diligence.
• The proposed acquisition was discussed at around $6 billion, but no agreement had been finalized.
• Decart develops AI infrastructure designed to improve chip efficiency and reduce training and inference costs.
• The companies could still pursue another form of collaboration.

 

According to Bloomberg's September 8 report, Anthropic explored an acquisition of Decart and conducted due diligence on the AI startup before ultimately deciding not to proceed.

The exact reason Anthropic walked away remains unclear. Representatives for both Anthropic and Decart declined to comment to Bloomberg, while one person familiar with the matter said the companies could still pursue other opportunities to work together.

Importantly, this wasn't a completed $6 billion acquisition that was later cancelled.

Reuters reported in August that Anthropic was in talks to acquire Nvidia-backed Decart, while Bloomberg put the potential value of the transaction at about $6 billion. At the time, the discussions remained at an early stage and no final agreement had been reached.

 

Why Was Anthropic Interested In Decart?

 

While Decart is also known for generative AI and world models such as Lucy and Oasis, its infrastructure and optimization technology appears to have been particularly relevant to Anthropic.

Decart's Decart Optimization Stack (DOS) is designed to improve the performance of AI training and inference workloads across hardware such as NVIDIA GPUs, Google TPUs and Amazon Trainium.

In its official $300 million funding announcement in May, Decart said DOS 2.0 could deliver more than 1,600 tokens per second for agentic inference compared with an industry average of around 200 tokens per second.

The company also claims its technology can achieve more than a 100x improvement in cost efficiency and operate eight times faster than comparable systems on equivalent hardware. These are Decart's own performance claims and have not been independently verified.

Such efficiency could be strategically important for Anthropic as demand for Claude and other AI services increases. Reuters previously reported that a completed acquisition could have helped Anthropic absorb additional demand, with Decart's team expected to join Anthropic's inference and performance organization.

Decart's infrastructure works with a customer's existing hardware instead of requiring it to be replaced, according to the company.

Nafea Bshara, Vice President at Amazon's Annapurna Labs, said in Decart's funding announcement that improved hardware utilization represented "real money saved and real time back."

 

Decart Raised $300 Million Earlier This Year

 

Decart raised $300 million in May 2026 in a funding round led by Radical Ventures.

NVIDIA, Adobe Ventures, Toyota Ventures, eBay Ventures, Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners joined the round, alongside existing investors including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark and Zeev Ventures.

Decart said the funding took its total capital raised to more than $450 million.

Bloomberg-linked reporting said the May round valued Decart at close to $4 billion. That would put the reported $6 billion acquisition price around 50% above that valuation only a few months later.

Founded in 2023, Decart describes itself as a vertically integrated AI research lab developing real-time world models alongside the infrastructure required to run them.

"World models are the key to moving AI from the virtual world into the physical world," Decart CEO and co-founder Dean Leitersdorf said in the company's May announcement.

   

Could Anthropic And Decart Still Work Together?

 

Walking away from the acquisition does not necessarily mean the relationship between Anthropic and Decart is over.

Bloomberg reported that the two companies may still consider other forms of collaboration, although neither side has announced an agreement.

For now, it remains unknown why Anthropic decided not to proceed after due diligence. Without a statement from either company, any suggestion that the price, technology, financial information or another issue specifically caused the talks to collapse would be speculation.