Anthropic Negotiates $6 Billion Acquisition of Israeli Decart to Address Claude's Inference Costs
According to Bloomberg, Anthropic is in talks for the largest acquisition in its history to incorporate Decart's GPU optimization stack and the Lucy and Oasis world models, in a year when it plans to go public.
Anthropic is negotiating the acquisition of Israeli startup Decart AI for approximately $6 billion, which would mark the company's largest acquisition ever. The information was published by Bloomberg on Wednesday and replicated by Fortune, Yahoo Finance, and Benzinga throughout the day. According to the reports, the deal has not yet been finalized, and discussions may end without a transaction. Anthropic had not publicly commented by the time this article was published, and Decart also did not confirm the amount.
The number on the table is worth context. Decart raised $300 million in May in a round led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, and was valued at about $4 billion. Twelve months earlier, it was valued at $3.1 billion. A $6 billion proposal represents a 50% premium over the last market valuation and, if materialized, corresponds to double the value paid by Anthropic for Stainless at the end of last year.
Why Decart
The asset is not the model. Decart operates an optimization stack called DOS, focused on reducing training and inference costs through GPU efficiency gains. The company has also built world models (Lucy and Oasis) that generate and manipulate video in real time within interactive environments. This combination is attractive to Anthropic: infrastructure that lowers the unit cost of tokens and a real-time media asset that fits as a building block for the next stage of multimodal agents.
Claude Fable 5, presented in early 2026, positioned Anthropic ahead in coding and business agency but left the company lagging in video generation and inference latency for audiovisual workloads. The DOS addresses the latter, while Lucy and Oasis bolster the former. Anthropic is preparing for its IPO in 2026, which gives this move a secondary objective: to demonstrate to the market that the company knows how to integrate M&A before going public.
What Israel Exports Now
Decart is the latest major deal involving an Israeli AI startup in recent months. The Tel Aviv ecosystem, historically strong in security and semiconductors, has become a pool for acquisitions by hyperscalers and American labs that need to quickly fill gaps in AI infrastructure. The average exit valuation for Israeli AI startups has risen to ten-digit figures in 2026, which is rare for the local market just two years ago.
For Silicon Valley, the reading is clear: with the cost of training a state-of-the-art model exceeding $1 billion per cycle, purchasing a team that has already optimized the stack is faster than replicating it internally. For European investors, this data is concerning. French and German inference optimization startups, with Mistral leading the way, continue to secure smaller rounds compared to their Israeli counterparts in the same verticals, raising discussions about access to sovereign capital within the bloc.
Impact Across Several Markets
In the U.S., the move faces another antitrust test. Acquisition exceeding $5 billion by private companies with projected annualized revenues in the tens of billions falls under automatic scrutiny since the update of Hart-Scott-Rodino in 2024. In Israel, the deal brings a wave of senior engineers to an American payroll, directly impacting the Israel Securities Authority and the local debate on talent retention.
In India, AI optimization service providers based in Bengaluru, like Fractal Analytics, will see the price of pure consulting for inference optimization decline in the medium term if DOS becomes a native resource of Claude. Much of the recent Indian consulting has sold this layer of expertise, and a dropping floor price also re-prices the hourly rate of senior engineers. In Brazil, banks and retailers using Claude via API benefit from the period in which cost reductions are reflected in pricing. Itaú, Nubank, and Magazine Luiza secured multi-year contracts with LLM providers throughout the first half of the year, with the price ceiling in these contracts negotiated before this week's M&A move.
The detail that remains officially unconfirmed is the timeline. If Anthropic closes before the S-1, the IPO carries a newly consolidated $6 billion asset. If it closes after, the market will price the M&A at the post-listing multiple. Both options suggest that Anthropic aims to resolve the Decart asset before the end of the quarter.