Anthropic Walks Away From $6 Billion Decart Acquisition After Due Diligence

Anthropic has walked away from talks to acquire Decart, the AI-efficiency startup it had been circling for roughly $6 billion, according to a Bloomberg report published Monday. The deal would have been the Claude maker's largest acquisition to date.

What went wrong

People familiar with the negotiations said Anthropic performed due diligence on Decart and ultimately decided against proceeding, with undisclosed findings during that process influencing the decision. Nothing had been finalized, and the two companies may still pursue other ways to collaborate, the report said.

Decart builds software that reduces the cost of training and running AI systems by making chips work more efficiently — a capability that has become strategically precious as frontier labs pour tens of billions of dollars into compute. For Anthropic, which signed a $50 billion American infrastructure commitment with Fluidstack last November, even single-digit efficiency gains translate into billions of dollars of avoided spending.

Awkward timing before a possible IPO

The collapse comes at a delicate moment. Anthropic is reportedly weighing an initial public offering as soon as this fall, and a $6 billion acquisition — paid largely in stock — would have been a signature move ahead of a listing. Walking away after diligence suggests the company found something it did not like, or simply concluded the price was wrong for a startup whose technology overlaps with work its own performance-engineering teams already do.

Anthropic has historically been conservative about M&A, preferring to build rather than buy. Its war chest — bolstered by a $13 billion raise last year — gives it room to move if a target emerges, but the Decart episode signals the bar remains high.

The bigger picture

The abandoned deal lands in a market where AI infrastructure valuations have inflated at extraordinary speed. Decart's implied $6 billion price tag had more than doubled from its last private valuation, part of a broader repricing of anything that promises to squeeze more useful compute out of scarce accelerators. Anthropic's retreat is one of the first public signs that even the best-funded buyers are starting to question those numbers.