Anthropic Walked Away From a ~$6B Decart Deal Post-LOI, and 20VC's Read Is That the Tech Did Not Generalize

Bloomberg (corroborated by The Next Web, Calcalist, Ynet and PYMNTS; the diligence read is from SaaStr/20VC, 2026-09-11)·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Bloomberg reported September 8 that Anthropic abandoned talks to buy Israeli inference-efficiency startup Decart for about $6B after diligence, an implied 50% premium on Decart's May round of $300M led by Radical Ventures at nearly $4B; it would have been Anthropic's largest acquisition and its fifth deal of 2026. On the September 11 20VC x SaaStr episode, the panel's reading was that diligence likely showed the efficiency claims did not generalize beyond video diffusion, and that the public leak damaged the deal more than the termination did. For anyone pricing inference-cost-reduction startups, a frontier lab declining at $6B after looking inside is the most informative data point of the week.