According to sources familiar with the situation, AI giant Anthropic has decided to abandon its planned acquisition of Israeli AI infrastructure startup Decart AI. The sources noted that Anthropic had been exploring the deal and conducting due diligence on Decart AI, but ultimately chose to walk away from the transaction. One of the sources indicated that the two companies may still pursue other forms of collaboration in the future.
Reports from August revealed that Anthropic was in advanced negotiations to acquire Decart AI, with a deal valuation estimated at around $6 billion. Had it been completed, this would have marked Anthropic's largest acquisition to date and served as a critical technological enhancement ahead of its anticipated initial public offering (IPO). Anthropic rarely engages in large-scale acquisitions, but it is currently investing heavily in computing power to develop new products, serve its clients, and prepare for the highly anticipated IPO.
The proposed acquisition was intended to help Anthropic's existing computing infrastructure absorb greater demand. Decart AI's core competency lies in maximizing the operational efficiency of various chips, with its software optimizing the training and inference processes of AI models to help developers extract more computing power from existing hardware.
Founded in 2023 in Israel by brothers Dean Leitersdorf and Orian Leitersdorf along with Moshe Shalev, Decart AI also develops what it calls "world models" designed to simulate the real world, targeting a range of commercial applications including autonomous driving and e-commerce. Its Lucy AI model can capture a person's real-time video and generate live, high-resolution video that makes it appear as though the individual is actually trying on a dress or a bag, a task that has long challenged fashion e-commerce technology developers.
Among its investors, e-commerce platform eBay Inc. is also a customer of Decart AI. In May, Decart AI announced it had completed a $300 million funding round led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Nvidia Corp., Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Adobe Ventures. Previous investors Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, and Zeev Ventures also joined the round.
The funding round valued Decart AI at nearly $4 billion, up from a valuation of $3.1 billion in August 2025. In an interview at the Raise AI conference in Paris this July, Decart AI CEO Dean Leitersdorf stated that the company trains AI using text and millions of hours of video to master the ability to simulate the physical properties of the real world. He noted that Decart AI's technology is being used for live streaming on online platforms such as Twitch, TikTok, and YouTube, with streamers like CodeMiko utilizing it, while advertising agencies and other enterprises are also employing the technology.