Anthropic in Reported Talks to Buy Israeli AI Startup Decart at $6–7 Billion; Amazon Was an Earlier Suitor

Anthropic has emerged as the lead suitor for Decart, the Israeli AI startup behind the Lucy and Oasis "world models," with the two sides reportedly exchanging drafts of an acquisition agreement that would value the three-year-old company at roughly $6 billion to $7 billion, according to reports from Bloomberg, Reuters and Israeli outlet Calcalist as aggregated by Yahoo Finance and the newsletter AI Weekly. Amazon was among the companies linked to Decart in earlier reporting on the sale process, but it does not appear in the later reporting on the Anthropic drafts; none of the available reports says Amazon has formally withdrawn.

Where the talks stand

According to Bloomberg's reporting as relayed by Yahoo Finance and confirmed by Reuters via Calcalist, Anthropic is in talks to acquire Decart for about $6 billion, with later reporting from newsletter AI Weekly putting the figure closer to $7 billion as the companies trade advanced drafts of an agreement. Bloomberg described the talks as still early-stage and said they could fall apart, and both Calcalist and Yahoo Finance noted that representatives for Anthropic declined to comment while Decart did not respond to requests for comment. No signed agreement has been reported.

AI Weekly's account adds detail not found elsewhere in the available reporting: that the consideration under discussion is mostly Anthropic stock rather than cash, and that Sequoia Capital, described as Decart's largest backer, is closely involved in the negotiations. The same report states that Decart's founders, Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, chose Anthropic even though Nvidia, already an investor in the startup, reportedly offered a higher valuation.

Amazon's earlier role in a wider auction

Before Anthropic's name surfaced as the lead bidder, Decart had been reported to be fielding interest from a broader set of companies. TradingView's GuruFocus wire reported that Decart was in advanced talks to sell itself for $6 billion to $7 billion, with SpaceX, Amazon and Nebius among the names linked to the process, and that Decart declined to comment at that stage; a LinkedIn post by Oded Orgil said Decart was fielding offers north of $6 billion from names as large as Amazon and SpaceX. Calcalist reported that Nvidia had held advanced negotiations to acquire Decart before another major technology player entered the process, and that Elon Musk has since said SpaceX will not acquire the company.

Amazon's interest appears to have been grounded in an existing commercial relationship rather than a cold approach. GuruFocus reported that Nvidia participated as an investor in Decart while Amazon became a strategic customer, and Calcalist's reporting states that Decart initially ran its technology primarily on Nvidia GPUs before deepening its cooperation with Amazon. GuruFocus's analysis, while cautioning that these were "strategic possibilities rather than confirmed transaction plans," suggested Amazon could have used Decart to deepen AWS's AI infrastructure offering given the existing customer relationship. There is no evidence in the available reporting that Amazon submitted a term sheet, entered exclusivity, or formally withdrew; the company simply does not appear in the later reporting on the Anthropic-Decart drafts.

What Decart actually builds

Decart describes itself as a developer of AI "world models" alongside optimization software designed to lower AI training costs by improving how efficiently chips are used. Its Lucy model edits live video in real time, including, per Yahoo Finance's reporting, processing live video feeds to show people wearing clothing or accessories for fashion e-commerce, a use case in which eBay is both an investor and a customer. Its Oasis model generates simulated environments used to train and test robotics and autonomous-driving systems; Calcalist reported that Oasis reached 1 million users within three days and, per information previously provided by the company, surpassed ChatGPT in downloads. AI Weekly reports that Decart says its optimization stack makes models "up to eight times faster on the same hardware," including Nvidia GPUs, Google TPUs and Amazon Trainium.

That hardware spread lines up with Anthropic's own compute arrangements as reported by Yahoo Finance: the company has agreed to use Amazon Web Services' custom Trainium chips in a long-term arrangement, announced plans to use Google's tensor processing units and reached a deal with SpaceX for computing power, and has been in talks to lease capacity from Meta in an arrangement that could be worth as much as $10 billion over two years, according to the New York Times. Reuters reported that if a deal closes, Decart's team would join Anthropic's inference and performance organization, and that Anthropic could use Decart's technology to absorb more demand as it expands computing capacity.

Bottom line: the reported price marks a steep step-up from Decart's last private mark. Calcalist and Yahoo Finance reported that Decart raised $300 million in May in a round led by Radical Ventures with Nvidia joining, valuing it at roughly $4 billion and lifting total funding to about $450 million for a company of roughly 100 employees. A $6 billion deal would represent a premium of about 50% over that valuation, according to The Next Web, which also reported this would be Anthropic's largest acquisition to date and its fifth of the year. Timing is a live variable rather than a settled fact: Yahoo Finance reported Anthropic submitted a confidential S-1 to the SEC in early June, and AI Weekly reported the public offering is expected in September or October, noting that signing before the IPO prices would fix the share ratio at a private mark rather than a market one — a point that matters for Decart holders taking Anthropic stock, since most of the reported consideration is equity. Nothing is signed: Bloomberg described the talks as early-stage and said they could fall apart.