Anthropic's largest acquisition ever was announced by everyone except Anthropic.
Reported price: $6 billion. Last known valuation: almost $4 billion, in May. Signatures: zero. Comment from either company: none.
"Anthropic is in talks to buy Israeli AI startup Decart for about $6 billion, in what would be its largest known acquisition, to cut AI compute costs ahead of its IPO" [SOURCE ↗]
Read Bloomberg's own words slowly: 'in talks', 'about $6 billion', 'has not been finalized', 'could fall through', 'declined to comment'.
Now read the same story after one lap through the aggregators: Anthropic 'pursues' a $6 billion acquisition 'to bolster infrastructure ahead of IPO'. Same facts, new certainty. Nobody added a source; they just upgraded the verbs.
The price deserves its own look. Decart was worth $3.1 billion last August and almost $4 billion in May. The number in Wednesday's headlines is $6 billion, and the only people vouching for it asked not to be identified.
Talks are probably real. Bloomberg does not invent them. But a leaked price with no signatures, three months before a hotly anticipated IPO, is a negotiating position wearing a press cycle.
Bloomberg moved the story on the evening of August 13: 'Anthropic PBC is in talks to buy the artificial intelligence startup Decart AI for about $6 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.' The second sentence of sourcing does a lot of quiet work: 'The deal has not been finalized and t
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