Anthropic Walks Away From a $6 Billion Decart Deal

Anthropic has walked away from talks to buy Decart AI for about $6 billion after finishing due diligence. People familiar with the matter said the Claude maker explored the purchase, reviewed the business, and then stopped. Representatives for both companies declined to comment.

The talks, which surfaced in August with nothing signed, were meant to be paid mostly in Anthropic shares as the lab prepared a listing. Decart had already halted a higher Nvidia bid to take that paper. Five days before the walk became public, Nvidia closed a much larger software purchase of its own.

Decart Stopped Nvidia Talks for Anthropic Stock

Decart was founded on September 7, 2023, by Dean Leitersdorf, his brother Orian Leitersdorf, and Moshe Shalev, engineers from Israel’s Unit 8200. The lab employs about 100 people in Tel Aviv and San Francisco. Dean Leitersdorf, the chief executive, has said he wanted the company to become “the Google or Apple of AI.”

People close to the sale said advanced talks with Nvidia, already an investor, were running first. Nvidia’s bid came in higher than Anthropic’s, in part because the chipmaker already sat on the cap table. Sequoia Capital, described as Decart’s largest investor, still preferred Anthropic, and the founders stopped the Nvidia process after the Claude maker’s offer arrived.

Most of the consideration was expected in Anthropic stock, timed to a listing the company had already put in front of the SEC. Deal reporting in mid-August described the parties exchanging advanced drafts, with boutique bank Catalyst advising Decart, and stressed that no contract had been signed. Google and SpaceX were named as other names that could re-enter if Anthropic stalled. On September 8, people familiar with the talks said Anthropic had walked.

DOS Claims 1,600 Tokens a Second

Public coverage treated Decart as a world-models lab because that is what the demos show. The purchase rationale, according to people familiar with Anthropic’s interest, was chip efficiency: software that would let Anthropic’s existing computers absorb more demand without a matching rise in hardware.

That software is the Decart Optimization Stack, or DOS, which the company says runs on Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs, and Amazon Trainium. Decart’s May funding post said DOS 2.0 delivers over 1,600 tokens per second for agentic inference, versus an industry average of around 200, and full-HD video and world-model inference at up to 100 frames per second. The same post claimed more than a 100x improvement in cost efficiency and live performance 8x faster than comparable systems on equivalent hardware.

DECART’S THREE PRODUCT LINES

• DOS 2.0: A training and inference stack that Decart licenses to cloud providers, AI labs, and hyperscalers, and also uses to run its own models.
• Lucy: A world model for live video editing and virtual try-on, answering in under 30 milliseconds, with Lucy 2.5 now sold as a public API.
• Oasis: A world model aimed at physical AI, robotics, and driving simulation, with Oasis 3 on the site as the current flagship demo.

Lucy is the product a shopper or streamer actually sees. Nafea Bshara, vice president at Amazon’s Annapurna Labs, tied the efficiency claim to silicon Amazon already sells.

They were among the first in the world to optimize on Trainium3 and have embraced our newest software libraries. The results speak for themselves. Their latest model, Lucy2, exceeds 80% Model FLOPS Utilization, meaning more of the chip’s raw power is doing real, productive work.

Nafea Bshara, VP, Amazon Annapurna Labs, Decart funding announcement

Leitersdorf still sells the other half of the company as the leap past text. “World models are the key to moving AI from the virtual world into the physical world,” he said when the May round landed. “Language models have taken us far, but they fundamentally operate in text.” Anthropic, whose products are those language models, was shopping the compiler underneath.

The $4 Billion Round That Set the Floor

A $6 billion price would have been a 50% markup on the last completed round, about three months earlier. On May 18, 2026, Decart raised $300 million led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia, Adobe Ventures, Toyota Ventures, eBay Ventures, Atreides Management, and Valor Equity Partners joining Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, and Zeev Ventures. That round valued the company at nearly $4 billion, up from $3.1 billion in August 2025. Decart says it has raised over $450 million in total.

Andrej Karpathy, former Disney chief Michael Eisner, and the Nintendo family are listed as individual backers. Amazon is a strategic customer. eBay is both an investor and a user. Jordan Jacobs, managing partner at Radical Ventures, called Decart “the engine powering the future of real-time media and physical AI” and said it had made real-time video “economically viable at massive scale.”

DECART’S PRICE PATH

The August price was a control premium on a three-year-old lab, not a new financing. People close to the process said the identity of the buyer mattered more to Decart’s shareholders than the last dollar of headline value, because Anthropic had no Israel development center and a listing calendar that could reprice the stock. That bet only works if the buyer closes.

Nvidia Wrote a $12.93 Billion Hugging Face Check

On September 3, 2026, Jensen Huang agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, the chipmaker’s largest outright company purchase. Huang wrote that more than 18 million developers use the platform to share more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets, and 1 million applications, and that Nvidia compute would not be required to build on it. The deal is expected to face a long close.

Nvidia was already on both sides of Decart. It put money into the May round even though DOS is built to move work across Nvidia, Google, and Amazon chips, the feature that made the stack useful to a lab that trains on several clouds. Then it offered more money than Anthropic to buy the whole company, and lost the process when Decart chose listing stock. By the time Anthropic walked on September 8, Nvidia had just written a much larger check for a different software hub.

Huang’s Hugging Face post promised the platform would stay open across clouds and accelerators. That is a cousin of Decart’s pitch, sold at more than double the price Anthropic had on the table. Whether Nvidia returns to Decart is not public. People who follow these sales note that a shopper who just spent $12.93 billion is a different bidder from the one Decart turned away in August.

Existing Cloud Contracts Cover Gigawatts of Capacity

Anthropic’s own answer to rising demand has been to buy computers, not to buy a 100-person efficiency lab. In April it said it was committing more than $100 billion over ten years to AWS, securing up to 5 gigawatts of new capacity across Graviton and Trainium chips. Amazon put in $5 billion on that announcement, with up to $20 billion more later, on top of $8 billion already invested. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, said users call Claude “increasingly essential to how they work,” and that the company needed infrastructure “to keep pace with rapidly growing demand.”

ANTHROPIC’S COMPUTE BOOK

• AWS capacity: Up to 5 gigawatts of new Trainium and Graviton supply, with nearly 1 gigawatt of Trainium2 and Trainium3 due by the end of 2026.
• SpaceX cluster: A May deal to use Colossus 1, adding more than 300 megawatts and over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.
• Other clouds: A 5 gigawatt Google and Broadcom TPU agreement from 2027, plus $30 billion of Azure capacity with Microsoft and Nvidia.
• Private funding: Anthropic raised $65 billion in Series H funding on May 28, 2026, at a $965 billion post-money price.

On June 1, Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1. People familiar with the listing work have said the company wants to raise as much as SpaceX, or more. A $6 billion stock issuance folded into that process would have moved the cap table, the narrative, and the lawyers’ calendar at the same time. Paying Amazon, Google, and SpaceX for gigawatts keeps the story simpler: Claude needs computers, and Anthropic is buying them.

What the Walk Leaves for Decart

Decart still has over $450 million raised, about 100 staff, and live customers on Amazon chips, but it now reopens a sale after the buyer it chose publicly walked. Other names that circulated in August, including Nvidia, Google, and SpaceX, are not in a disclosed process. People familiar with the talks said the two companies may still collaborate. Lucy 2.5 is already metered at $0.02 per second for live 720p video on Decart’s own API.

Diligence is supposed to kill deals. The expensive part is the sequence. Decart froze a higher Nvidia bid, told shareholders the Anthropic stock was the prize, and then absorbed a unilateral no after drafts had already been exchanged. The next buyer inherits a company Anthropic studied and left, which is a fact other shops will price even if they never learn what the files contained.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The walk: People familiar with the matter said Anthropic finished due diligence and decided against a purchase of about $6 billion, and both companies declined to comment.
• The stock structure: People close to the talks said most of the price was to be paid in Anthropic shares, and that no agreement had been signed.
• The Nvidia bid: The same circle said Nvidia offered a higher valuation and that Decart halted those talks after Anthropic appeared.
• The products: DOS, Lucy, and Oasis are live enough to price on an API and to run Lucy2 on Trainium3 at more than 80% chip use, per Amazon’s Annapurna lab.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The walk reason: No finding from diligence has been described, including technology, books, scale, or listing complexity.
• Other buyers: Google and SpaceX were named as possible alternatives in August; neither has a public process.
• A fallback partnership: People familiar with the talks said other collaboration is possible, with no customer, license, or investment announced.

Leitersdorf told an audience in Paris in July that Decart trains on text and millions of hours of video to simulate real-world physics. That is a research lab’s pitch. The commercial stack is a compiler that makes other people’s chips busier, sold into the same clouds Anthropic already pays. One can be licensed without buying the other. That is the door the “may still collaborate” line leaves open, and it is a much smaller door than a $6 billion merger.

Toolchain Deals Stay Small Before the Listing

Anthropic has been buying software it already used, at prices that do not move a $965 billion private mark. It took the JavaScript toolkit Bun in December 2025 to help Claude Code. It bought the computer-use startup Vercept on February 25, 2026, and shut Vercept’s own product weeks later. In May it bought Stainless, the SDK generator that already built Claude’s official libraries, a purchase early reports put above $300 million.

Those targets were tools on Claude’s path, not a second frontier lab with its own world models, its own API, and a cap table that includes Nvidia, Sequoia, and Amazon as a customer. A $6 billion stock deal would have been larger than that entire run of buys, issued just as bankers at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and J.P. Morgan were working a public filing. Walking is consistent with a company that purchases compilers in the hundreds of millions and computers in the hundreds of billions, and that declined to put a three-year-old lab on the S-1 at a 50% premium to May.

Decart still has over $450 million of backing, Lucy running at $0.02 a second, and a chip stack Amazon is already quoting at 80% use. Nvidia, Google, and SpaceX were named as other possible buyers while the Anthropic drafts circulated. None of those talks is a live, disclosed deal on September 8.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of private-company talks, funding figures, and listing plans, and it is for information only. It is not investment advice, a solicitation, or a recommendation to buy or sell any public stock, private share, fund interest, or other security. Readers who are considering an investment in Anthropic, Decart, Nvidia, or related vehicles should consult a licensed financial adviser or securities lawyer and review actual offering documents before acting. Deal values, headcounts, product claims, and listing timelines reflect the sources available on September 8, 2026, and can change without a public filing.