Anthropic Reportedly in Talks to Acquire AI Startup Decart for $6 Billion
- $6,000,000,000 the price Anthropic is reportedly discussing to acquire Decart, according to people familiar with the matter — Bloomberg, Aug. 13, 2026
- $4,000,000,000 Decart's valuation after a $300 million funding round in May 2026 — the reported talk price would be roughly a 50% premium over that figure — Reporting on Decart's May 2026 raise
- ~100 employees at Decart as of its most recent funding round — Decart / company reporting
- $965,000,000,000 Anthropic's own valuation after a roughly $65 billion funding round around May 2026 — Fortune, citing Bloomberg
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of AI models, is reportedly in early-stage talks to acquire Decart, a two-year-old AI startup that builds real-time video-generation technology, for roughly $6,000,000,000. Bloomberg broke the story on August 13, 2026, citing people familiar with the matter; the report was syndicated by Yahoo Finance the same day and independently corroborated by Haaretz, Calcalist, and The Jerusalem Post.
Nothing about this deal is finalized. No sources reviewed for this page describe a signed agreement, and the deal structure — cash, stock, or some mix — has not been disclosed. Both companies declined to comment when asked, which is standard corporate practice during unconfirmed acquisition discussions, not itself a signal about whether the talks will produce a deal.
What follows lays out what is being reported, what Decart actually builds, why the timing lines up with Anthropic’s broader trajectory toward a possible 2026 IPO, and what remains genuinely unknown about whether this deal happens at all.
Per Bloomberg’s reporting, Anthropic is discussing a purchase price of approximately $6,000,000,000 for Decart. The report describes the talks as ongoing rather than concluded, and Bloomberg’s sourcing — people familiar with the matter, speaking on background — is typical of pre-announcement M&A reporting rather than an official disclosure from either company. Calcalist has separately reported that if a deal does close, Decart’s team could join Anthropic’s inference and performance organization, the group responsible for making Claude’s models run efficiently at scale.
Neither company has confirmed the talks publicly. That silence is worth noting plainly rather than reading into: declining to comment on unconfirmed acquisition discussions is the default posture for companies in Decart and Anthropic’s position, and it applies whether or not a deal ultimately gets signed.
Decart was founded in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf (CEO), his brother Orian Leitersdorf, and Moshe Shalev. Dean and Moshe met while serving in Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals-intelligence corps that has produced a long line of technology founders. The company builds what it calls “world model” technology — AI systems that generate and transform video in real time rather than rendering it frame-by-frame after the fact.
Decart’s flagship product is Lucy, its live-video model. Earlier releases built the company’s reputation: Oasis, a Minecraft-style AI-generated playable world that went viral in late 2024, and MirageLSD, a live-video-transform tool Decart says operates at sub-40-millisecond latency — fast enough to reshape video streams in something close to real time. The through-line across all three products is speed: generating and altering video fast enough to feel live, rather than as a rendering job a user waits on.
That distinction — real-time generation versus batch rendering — is the technical bet Decart’s backers are making. Most AI video tools on the market today generate a clip and hand it back after a processing delay measured in seconds or minutes. Decart’s products are built to generate or transform the video stream as it plays, which is the property that made Oasis feel like a playable game rather than a video, and that Decart argues opens up live applications — interactive entertainment, real-time video editing, and augmented broadcast — that batch-rendering tools cannot serve.
Announcing our latest live-video AI model release.
Decart’s valuation has climbed quickly. The company was valued at roughly $3,100,000,000 in August 2025. In May 2026 it raised $300,000,000 at a valuation of about $4,000,000,000, in a round led by Radical Ventures with participation from Nvidia, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Toyota Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, eBay Ventures, and Zeev Ventures, plus individual investors including Andrej Karpathy and Michael Eisner. Total funding raised to date is approximately $450,000,000, across a company of roughly 100 employees. A $6,000,000,000 talk price would put the deal at roughly a 50% premium over that three-month-old valuation.
On Anthropic’s side, the timing sits inside a much larger story. The company was valued at approximately $965,000,000,000 after a roughly $65,000,000,000 funding round around May 2026, reportedly making it more valuable than OpenAI at the time. Anthropic has also reportedly confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the SEC in June 2026, with a rumored October 2026 target valuation around $2,000,000,000,000 — which, per Fortune’s reporting sourced to Bloomberg, would make it the largest public stock offering ever, surpassing SpaceX’s. Investors reportedly estimate Anthropic’s annual revenue run rate could reach roughly $100,000,000,000 to $120,000,000,000 by the end of 2026.
A Decart deal would reportedly be among Anthropic’s more active acquisition moves this year, following a pattern documented by Calcalist: Anthropic acquired the workflow-evaluation startup Humanloop in August 2025 and the Bun JavaScript runtime in December 2025, and acqui-hired Runhouse, an AI compute-resource-management startup with an Israeli chief technology officer, in April 2026. Commenting on the Runhouse deal at the time, Guy Fighel, partner and head of AI at the Israeli venture firm Hetz Ventures, said: “The company is looking very, very closely at the Israeli market.”
The Anthropic report also arrived two days after a separate, since-denied rumor. On August 11, 2026, Israeli media reported that SpaceX was in talks to acquire Decart; Elon Musk publicly called that report “fake news” on X the same day, per Haaretz’s reporting. That episode is a distinct, resolved data point — it does not confirm or undercut the separate Anthropic talks reported two days later.
Several things this page deliberately does not claim: that a deal has been signed, that the $6,000,000,000 figure is final rather than a number under discussion, that the deal will be paid in cash versus stock, or that Decart’s team joining Anthropic’s inference and performance organization is a confirmed outcome rather than reporting on one possible arrangement. Talks at this stage can close on different terms than first reported, stall, or fall through entirely — all three are common outcomes for reported-but-unconfirmed technology acquisitions.
The timing invites a broader question the reporting does not answer: whether this is a straightforward technology-and-talent acquisition, a defensive move to keep a fast-scaling video-AI startup out of a rival’s hands, or simply one data point in a wider wave of AI dealmaking as well-capitalized labs use record valuations to consolidate smaller, specialized teams ahead of possible public offerings. Bloomberg’s report does not characterize Anthropic’s motive beyond describing the talks themselves, and this page does not speculate beyond what its sources state.
This page will be updated if Anthropic or Decart issues an official statement, if a definitive agreement is signed, or if the talks are reported to have ended without a deal.
Bloomberg reports that Anthropic is in talks to acquire the live-video AI startup Decart for roughly $6,000,000,000, citing people familiar with the matter. That is where the confirmed facts end. No signed agreement, deal structure, or official comment from either company has been reported. This is an early-stage, unconfirmed acquisition discussion that fits a broader pattern of Anthropic scale and dealmaking ahead of a possible 2026 IPO — not, as of this writing, a completed transaction.
