After weeks of intensive negotiations, the huge $6 billion deal that could have brought Anthropic to Israel through the acquisition of AI startup Decart, has been canceled. "Bloomberg" revealed the existence of the negotiations in August and then last night revealed that it had reached an impasse. What led to the collapse of the deal that could have put Israel on the AI map and turned the founders, Dean Leitersdorf, Orian Leitersdorf and Moshe Shalev, who hold 64% of the company's shares, into billionaires?
A surprise in the due diligence
According to "Bloomberg," the deal collapsed during negotiations between the two at the initiative of Anthropic, which decided to give it up at a relatively late stage, after completing the due diligence - a process in which the buyer thoroughly scans the acquired company for its technology, customer agreements and databases, and after the companies signed a letter of intent (LOI) between them for the acquisition.
"Bloomberg" speculates that there could have been several reasons for such a decision. Firstly, Anthropic may not have been sufficiently impressed with Decart’s technology, which began developing language model optimization technology so that a larger number of processing operations can be run on each processor, and then moved on to develop its own models. In this case, Anthropic may have had a different impression than its initial impression of the Israeli technology, or it may have met its expectations, but Anthropic later realized that it could develop similar technology itself or acquire similar companies at a lower price. It is also possible that Decart’s business, which has undergone several changes and upheavals over the past few years, was too small for the buyer, although such acquisitions are usually made to access exceptional technology.
In any case, even if the deal was canceled at the buyer's initiative, the two did not progress beyond the declaration of intent stage, while the signing and closing stage, so that the buyer could have withdrawn from it without paying a penalty or compensation to Decart.
The Israeli perspective
However, it is not at all certain that Anthropic withdrew from the deal voluntarily. Sources close to Decart are convinced that Anthropic was enthusiastic about the Israeli company's technology, but the potential buyer's main demand to move Decart’s center of operations to San Francisco was opposed by the Leitersdorf brothers and Shalev, who preferred to stay in Tel Aviv.
Since most of Decart’s activity revolves R&D of language models, with an emphasis on inference models, Anthropic insisted that a significant portion of the talent, and possibly even the intellectual property, be transferred from Israel to California - a demand the founders refused.
Despite the spread of remote work since Covid and the importance of global development centers in prominent AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, - the bulk of development activity is managed not just from Silicon Valley, but from San Francisco itself. Decart’s development center in Israel has about 100 employees, who, according to Anthropic's plans, were supposed to move to California, through personal agreements.
The upcoming IPO
Anthropic is currently making strenuous efforts to complete an IPO in the coming weeks, possibly even this month, at a desired market value of $2 trillion. One of the prevailing speculations in the market concerns the company's concern not only about making too big a move before going public, but also about the decline in the value of its shares. Anthropic's shareholders may have sold shares when the lock-up period began, thereby contributing to the decline in the share price. It is possible that both parties realized that it was necessary to see how the market received the large AI company and then reconsider the acquisition deal.
No comment from Anthropic or Decart has been forthcoming.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 8, 2026.
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