Anthropic in Talks to Buy Video-AI Startup Decart for $6B — Its Largest Acquisition Ever
Anthropic is reportedly negotiating to acquire Israeli startup Decart, whose Lucy and Oasis models power real-time video editing and simulated environments for robotics training.
Anthropic is in talks to acquire Israeli AI startup Decart for roughly $6 billion, according to Bloomberg. If it closes, it would be Anthropic’s largest acquisition to date, by a wide margin.
Decart builds AI models that push past text into real-time video and simulated environments. Its Lucy model lets users edit live video streams in real time — reshaping a scene as it’s being captured, not in post. Its Oasis model generates interactive simulated environments used to train and test robotics and autonomous-driving systems, effectively a world model you can drop an agent into before it touches physical hardware.
The price tag is the striking part. Decart raised $300 million in May 2026 in a round led by Radical Ventures, with Nvidia joining as a new investor — a raise that valued the company at nearly $4 billion. A $6 billion acquisition three months later would mark a roughly 50% markup in a single quarter, on top of an already aggressive valuation for a company still built around research-stage world models rather than shipped products at scale.
For Anthropic, the strategic logic is compute and capability, not just video generation as a feature. Decart’s optimization work targets getting more useful output per GPU-hour — exactly the constraint Anthropic is straining against as Claude usage scales. World models and simulated environments also matter beyond video: they’re the substrate agentic AI needs to practice in before acting in the real world, which lines up with Anthropic’s push into computer-use and agentic products.
Talks are ongoing and unconfirmed by either company; terms could still shift or the deal could fall apart. But the timing tracks with a broader pattern — frontier labs increasingly buying rather than building for capabilities adjacent to their core model business, converting fundraising war chests into vertical integration before a competitor locks up the same team or technology.
Anthropic hasn’t disclosed how Decart’s roughly 100-person team or its Nvidia relationship would be handled post-acquisition, or whether Lucy and Oasis would ship as standalone products, fold into Claude’s multimodal roadmap, or both.