No, Anthropic reportedly will not be buying this non-anthropic company

Decart would be a fun company for Anthropic to buy, which is why Bloomberg’s report that Anthropic was looking to do so was newsworthy. Last month, I wrote that Bloomberg’s initial report on the story was “one of those anonymously sourced Bloomberg stories that you can’t help but suspect might exist solely to help one side or the other in ongoing negotiations,” and I ended with, “The deal could still fall through.”

So what have we learned now that Bloomberg thinks it has?

Let me remind you that this is an Anthropic atmosphere:

And here is the atmosphere of Descartes:

Decart is an intriguing company. Its standout products are the colorful “world models” Lucy and Oasis. Both make amazing demos. Its Lucy model allows real-time replacement and editing of key details—like entire faces—in high-quality videos, allowing you to, say, replace yourself in a Twitch stream with a high-definition facsimile of an anime character. Oasis, meanwhile, can take images as input and generate game “worlds” in the form of what are essentially first-person shooter video games (without the shooting).

Anthropic’s interest in this almost certainly lay in the underlying technology behind Lucy and Oasis: DOS, or Decart Optimization Stack, which supposedly optimizes the interaction between artificial intelligence hardware and software, reducing computational costs. Anthropic is spending heavily on computing and is planning to soon become the world’s largest IPO, rumored to take place around Halloween.

According to Bloomberg’s anonymous sources, Anthropic “conducted due diligence on Descartes but ultimately walked away.” But one added that Anthropic and Decart “could still pursue other opportunities to collaborate,” according to Bloomberg.