Anthropic walks away from $6B Decart acquisition talks

Anthropic has pulled out of negotiations to acquire Israeli AI startup Decart in a deal valued at roughly $6 billion, ending what would have been the company’s largest acquisition by a wide margin. The withdrawal, which surfaced on September 8, 2026, leaves one of the AI industry’s most closely watched deals on the cutting room floor. And it comes at a particularly awkward moment for Anthropic, which is reportedly eyeing an IPO as soon as this fall. What Decart brings to the table Decart is not your typical AI startup chasing the next chatbot or image generator. Founded in September 2023, the company builds chip-optimization software designed to make AI inference, the process of actually running trained models, significantly more efficient. The startup’s focus areas span generative video, robotics simulation, and autonomous systems. All three are compute-hungry domains where shaving even small percentages off processing costs can translate into massive savings at scale. Decart’s fundraising trajectory reflects how seriously the industry takes its technology. The company raised approximately $450 million in total, with a $300 million round closing in May 2026 that pegged its valuati...