Anthropic is in early talks to acquire Decart, an Israeli artificial intelligence startup, for around $6 billion, according to reports from Bloomberg and Reuters.
The deal would be by far the largest acquisition made by the company behind the Claude chatbot, which is preparing for a stock market listing.
Talks remain at an early stage and could still collapse.
Decart's team would join Anthropic's inference and performance group if a transaction completes, Reuters reported.
Inference is the running of a trained AI model to answer queries, and it accounts for a growing share of the industry's computing bill.
That is where Decart's appeal lies.
The company builds infrastructure and optimisation software designed to squeeze more performance out of a range of chips, alongside its own models.
Its Lucy model edits live video in real time, while Oasis generates simulated environments used to train robotics and self-driving systems.
Oasis reached a million users within three days of launch and briefly overtook ChatGPT in downloads, according to the company.
Anthropic said last week it was recruiting engineers to work on custom chips and on making Claude run faster and more cheaply.
A purchase at $6 billion would mark a steep rise for a company valued at roughly $4 billion in May, when it raised $300 million in a round led by Radical Ventures with Nvidia joining as an investor.
Decart was founded in 2023 by Dean Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, who met in the Israeli military's Unit 8200 signals intelligence unit, and employs about 100 people.
Its earlier rounds valued it at $500 million and then $3.1 billion, making the sale one of the fastest escalations in Israeli technology.
Nvidia had held advanced talks to buy Decart before higher offers arrived, Calcalist reported, with Amazon, Nebius and SpaceX also named as potential bidders.
Elon Musk has since said SpaceX will not buy the company.
