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

Anthropic PBC, a major player in artificial intelligence, is in talks to acquire the startup Decart AI for approximately $6 billion, according to people familiar with the negotiations. The deal isn't finalized and the talks could still fall through, but if completed, it would become the largest known acquisition in Anthropic's history — coming just as the company is widely expected to pursue an IPO (initial public offering, when a company's shares first go on sale to the public).

Decart is known for building world models — AI systems that simulate physical reality — and also develops software that boosts chip efficiency, lowering the cost of training AI. Sources say that same technology could let Anthropic take on more load within its existing infrastructure. Anthropic, which has historically been sparing with large acquisitions, has been pouring significant money into computing capacity of late.

Decart's Lucy AI model, for instance, processes a live video feed of a person in real time and recreates it as high-fidelity video that makes it look like they're "trying on" a shirt or a bag — a long-standing challenge for fashion e-commerce companies, particularly rendering fabric texture realistically. eBay is both an investor in and a customer of Decart.

Founded in 2023 by three Israeli engineers — brothers Dean and Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev — Decart raised $300 million in a funding round led by Radical Ventures in May, with participation from Nvidia, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Adobe Ventures. That round valued the startup at nearly $4 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal — up from $3.1 billion in August 2025. Speaking at the Raise AI conference in Paris in July, Decart CEO Dean Leitersdorf said: "I can't imagine being in any other market. This market is moving so fast that we're going to reinvent almost every part of the economy over the next 18 to 24 months."

Israeli business outlet Calcalistech reported that a Decart acquisition by SpaceX had also been discussed, but billionaire Elon Musk called the report "fake news" on his social network X. Meanwhile, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have committed to spending tens, even hundreds, of billions of dollars on data centers — costs that could weigh on them as they head toward their Wall Street debuts.