Anthropic, the maker of the Claude family of models, is reportedly in talks to acquire Decart AI, an Israeli startup building real-time world-model and generative-video technology, for roughly $6 billion. The report, first published by Bloomberg and citing people familiar with the matter, has since been corroborated by CNBC-TV18 and Israeli outlet Calcalist — though all three sources are consistent on one important point: the deal is not finalized, and talks could still fall apart.
If it goes through, this would be one of the larger acquisitions in Anthropic’s history, and a notable signal about where frontier AI labs think the next layer of infrastructure needs to be built.
What Decart Actually Builds
Decart is a three-year-old Israeli startup working across two related areas, according to the reporting and the company’s own public materials:
- Chip performance optimization — helping AI developers extract more performance out of a wide range of hardware, via an inference and training stack the company calls DOS.
- Real-time world models — generative systems, including products called Lucy and Oasis (with Oasis 3 as the latest iteration), that can generate or modify live video feeds instantly. Applications cited include immersive gaming environments, virtual try-ons, advertising, and — notably for the agentic AI and robotics space — photorealistic, controllable driving simulations for training autonomous vehicles and robots.
That last piece is likely the strategic core of Anthropic’s interest. World models — systems that can simulate physical or interactive environments with enough fidelity to train or evaluate other AI systems inside them — are increasingly discussed as a foundational layer for physical AI and robotics, not just video generation. For a company like Anthropic, whose core product lineage is language and coding agents, owning simulation infrastructure would extend its reach into a genuinely different but complementary technical domain.
The Numbers, and Why They Moved
Bloomberg’s reporting puts the deal figure at roughly $6 billion — a jump from a reported valuation of around $4 billion just months earlier. According to Calcalist’s coverage, Decart had previously been in advanced talks for a sale in the $6-7 billion range with other potential acquirers, including reported interest from Nvidia, SpaceX, and Amazon, before this current Anthropic negotiation emerged. Decart was reportedly close to a deal with Nvidia before a larger bid changed the calculus.
None of this is confirmed as a done deal. Per CNBC-TV18’s report, a representative for Anthropic declined to comment, and a Decart spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment outside regular business hours. That’s a fairly standard “no comment” pattern for early-stage acquisition talks, and it’s consistent with how Bloomberg, CNBC-TV18, and Calcalist have all framed the story: sourced to unnamed insiders, described explicitly as “in talks,” and not yet finalized.
Why This Matters for the Agentic AI Space
It’s worth being honest about scope here: this isn’t an agentic-AI-native story in the way a new coding harness release or a permission-model change is. Decart’s technology doesn’t run autonomous agents; it generates and simulates environments. But the connective tissue to agentic AI is real and worth spelling out:
Simulation as agent training infrastructure. As agentic systems get pushed toward more physical and embodied tasks — robotics, autonomous vehicles, real-world tool use — the bottleneck increasingly isn’t the reasoning model itself but the quality and cost of environments to train and evaluate it in. Real-time, controllable world models are one of the more promising answers to that bottleneck, and acquiring rather than building that capability in-house would be a meaningfully faster path for Anthropic.
A pattern among frontier labs. Decart’s reported list of prior suitors — Nvidia, SpaceX, Amazon — reads like a who’s-who of companies with a stake in physical-world AI and robotics, not just chatbots. That a language-model-focused lab like Anthropic is now the one at the table suggests the boundary between “language model company” and “physical AI infrastructure company” is getting less clean as the industry matures.
Capital intensity is rising. A $6 billion price tag, up from $4 billion within months, is also a data point about how quickly valuations are moving in adjacent infrastructure categories as demand for training and simulation capacity grows.
What to Watch Next
Because this is confirmed-as-in-talks reporting rather than a completed transaction, the responsible framing going forward is to watch for:
- An official announcement or confirmation from either Anthropic or Decart
- Whether the reported $6 billion figure holds, moves, or the deal collapses entirely (as sometimes happens with reported-but-unconfirmed negotiations)
- Any regulatory scrutiny given Anthropic’s scale and the increasing attention on AI-sector consolidation
We’ll follow up if and when either company confirms the deal, or if it falls through.
Sources
- Anthropic said in talks to buy AI startup Decart for $6 billion — Bloomberg (via CNBC-TV18 syndication)
- Calcalist: Decart acquisition talks coverage
- Decart AI — official site
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