Anthropic Walks Away From $6 Billion Deal to Buy Israeli AI Startup Decart

Anthropic has pulled out of talks to acquire Israeli AI startup Decart AI in a deal that would have been valued at roughly $6 billion, according to Bloomberg. The withdrawal surfaced this week, according to PA News, which cited Bloomberg reporting that Anthropic had conducted due diligence on Decart before deciding to walk away. PA News reported the two companies may still explore other forms of collaboration going forward, though no specifics were given.

What Decart actually does

Decart isn't a chatbot company. Founded in September 2023, the Israeli startup builds what it calls the Decart Optimization Stack, software designed to squeeze more performance out of AI chips during inference, the stage where a trained model actually runs, according to techtime.news.

The company's pitch is that a big chunk of the computing power in AI accelerators goes unused, and its software layer working across Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs, and AWS Trainium chips can close that gap. Decart claims its technology can run some workloads roughly five times faster than a typical inference provider, according to techtime.news.

Decart also has two consumer-facing products built on that infrastructure: Lucy, which transforms live video in real time based on text prompts, and Oasis, an interactive "world model" aimed at robotics and autonomous vehicle simulation.

How the deal got this far

Decart's fundraising history shows how seriously investors have taken the technology. The company raised roughly $450 million total, including a $300 million round in May 2026 that valued it at approximately $4 billion, with Nvidia among the backers, according to Crypto Briefing.

Anthropic's offer, reported to be structured mostly in stock, valued Decart at around $6 billion, a roughly 50% premium over that May valuation, according to Crypto Briefing. Talks reportedly reached an advanced stage by mid-August 2026, and techtime.news first reported on August 20 that Bloomberg and Reuters had confirmed discussions were underway, with Reuters noting at the time there was no certainty a deal would be reached.

One detail stands out: Decart's three founders reportedly retained about 64% ownership of the company even after raising nearly half a billion dollars, giving them unusual leverage in negotiations, according to Crypto Briefing. Nvidia, already an investor, reportedly put forward its own competing offer that was considered more financially attractive than Anthropic's, but Decart's founders chose to pursue the Anthropic deal instead, according to Crypto Briefing's reporting.

Why Anthropic backed out is still unknown

Bloomberg and the outlets citing it have not disclosed why Anthropic walked away. Crypto Briefing raised the possibility that Anthropic's own IPO plans played a role, noting the company is reportedly eyeing a public listing as soon as this fall. Closing a $6 billion stock-based acquisition right before an IPO could complicate Anthropic's shareholder structure and financial story for prospective investors, but Crypto Briefing did not attribute that reasoning to Anthropic itself, and no source confirms it as the actual cause.

PA News, also citing Bloomberg, noted Anthropic has rarely pursued large-scale M&A and has instead been pouring resources into computing power for its own products while preparing for an IPO that PA News said could approach or even surpass the scale of SpaceX. That comparison comes from PA News's sourcing, not from any Anthropic statement.

Neither Anthropic nor Decart has issued a public statement explaining the breakdown. Newsquawk's market-feed summary of the story offered no additional detail beyond confirming the walk-away had been reported.

What's unresolved

The open questions are straightforward. Does Anthropic's IPO timeline, if real, actually explain the withdrawal, or is there a separate dispute over price, technology, or integration that hasn't surfaced yet? And does Decart, sitting on Nvidia as an investor after turning down Nvidia's own acquisition offer, now revisit that relationship or look for another buyer entirely? None of the sourcing so far answers either question, and no new filing or statement from either company has addressed it.