Anthropic has terminated talks to acquire Israeli AI startup Decart, walking away from a deal that would have been the largest known acquisition in the company’s history at roughly $6 billion, according to a Bloomberg report. The price represented about a 50% premium over Decart’s most recent private valuation, and the talks ended after Anthropic conducted due diligence on the company.
What Decart does
Decart, founded in Tel Aviv, builds real-time generative video models and has raised from investors including Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz at valuations that climbed rapidly through 2025 and 2026. Its models generate interactive video environments in real time rather than pre-rendered clips, a capability that sits adjacent to the world models work being pursued by Google DeepMind, Runway and World Labs. For Anthropic, whose public product line centers on the Claude assistant and enterprise coding tools, the target would have been an unusual expansion into consumer-facing generative media.Bloomberg did not detail what specifically emerged in due diligence, and neither company has commented publicly on the end of the talks. The report framed the termination as Anthropic’s decision after reviewing the target. Decart continues operating independently, and its most recent fundraising round left it valued near $4 billion.
A restrained deal pattern
The walkaway fits Anthropic’s acquisition history, which has been unusually conservative for a company of its size and valuation. The startup, now valued above $300 billion in secondary markets ahead of a planned IPO, has made only small technology hires and tuck-in purchases rather than billion-dollar acquisitions. OpenAI, by contrast, has spent roughly $6.5 billion on io, the hardware startup founded by Jony Ive, and acquired Windsurf’s talent in a contested deal last year before the licensing arrangement fell apart. Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI to recruit its leadership, and Google has spent heavily on character-level acqui-hires of AI coding talent.The $6 billion figure for Decart would have nearly matched OpenAI’s io outlay and would have been Anthropic’s first entry into that tier of spending. A 50% premium over a startup’s private valuation is also the kind of price that tends to draw board scrutiny, since private AI valuations have been repriced repeatedly this year. Genius Group, an education company with an AI treasury portfolio, disclosed significant repricing in its own AI holdings in August, and secondary-market discounts on private AI stakes have become common as investors wait for the IPO window to open.
Context around the timing
The termination lands in a crowded week for Anthropic news. The company is heading toward a confidential IPO filing, with Bloomberg reporting this week that it is in a race with OpenAI to go public. A separate Bloomberg report put it in talks to raise up to $10 billion in new funding. Its Claude models remain at the top of coding benchmarks, and its enterprise business has been growing faster than its consumer one. On the policy side, the Pentagon’s classified AI contracts announced in May excluded Anthropic after a dispute over autonomous weapons, and the company has since pursued government work through narrower channels.Acquiring a real-time video startup would have shifted the story from coding and enterprise reliability toward consumer media, an area where OpenAI’s Sora has dominated attention and where Google’s Veo has been gaining ground. Deciding not to make that pivot while preparing for an IPO and a record funding round is a coherent explanation, though neither company confirmed its reasoning. Public-company investors tend to reward focus and cash discipline in the quarters before a listing, and a $6 billion all-in bet on an unproven consumer video market is the opposite of that posture.
What it signals
Implications for the market are modest but real. Anthropic walking away removes a well-funded bidder from the list of potential buyers for generative video companies, and it signals that even the largest AI labs are testing acquisition targets against diligence rather than buying at any price. Decart’s founders now face the same question as other well-capitalized AI startups without a natural parent: raise more, or find a different buyer before the window narrows. With IPO windows approaching for several of the labs and the broader market repricing private AI assets downward, more disciplined behavior on M&A from the biggest players would be consistent with what public-market investors tend to reward.
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