Anthropic Is Reportedly Looking to Buy This Seemingly Un-Anthropic-Like Startup

In one of those anonymously-sourced Bloomberg articles you can’t help but suspect might exist solely to help out one or another side in an ongoing negotiation, it’s being reported that Anthropic might soon buy the AI lab Decart for roughly $6 billion.

Decart doesn’t promote itself via the sort of drab, enterprise-focused coding and productivity tools you may associate with the home of Claude Code. Anthropic has never released an image generator, let alone a Sora-style video generator. Instead, it releases austere, hand-wringing blog posts, and plugins that attempt to make paralegals obsolete.

But Decart, it seems, likes to party:

So why would Anthropic hypothetically be interested in buying this?

You have to understand what’s under the hood. Decart promotes itself as the creator of Lucy, Oasis, and DOS (No, not that DOS. Go take your Lipitor if you thought that). Lucy is a video model that accomplishes what you might call “deepfake passes” in real-time, changing faces and other details in high-quality live video. Oasis is marketed as an interactive world model, which you might recall seeing way back in 2024 when it generated what was effectively a playable version of Minecraft from image inputs.

DOS is the engine that drives Lucy and Oasis, and that’s evidently what interests Anthropic. The name stands for Decart Optimization Stack. Decart calls it “A vertically integrated inference and training platform for real-time AI workloads, spanning hardware-aware model design, kernel tooling, proprietary compilers, and inference optimization.”

You could say compute is getting pretty expensive for Anthropic. For example, Anthropic pays xAI $1.25 billion per month to train and/or run AI models in its enormous data centers. Decart claims that DOS “squeezes every ounce of performance from every chip, across inference, training and hardware so AI teams can run faster, cheaper and at higher utilization.” That could, if its real, be worth $6 billion to a company eyeing the largest IPO of all time.

Note that the story is sourced to “people familiar with the matter,” and Bloomberg says the deal could still crumble.

Reporting from Gizmodo contributed to this story.