Anthropic’s $6 Billion Deal Talks With Decart Show Focus on Cost Efficiency

As Anthropic preps for its initial public offering, there’s a math puzzle not even its ultrafrontier models can solve: What’s the right price?

Not just the price of its eventual IPO (though that’s certainly top of mind these days), but also the price of using its suite of high-powered artificial intelligence tools. On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic is in talks to pay $6 billion for startup Decart, which makes software that improves chip efficiency, reducing the cost of training and running AI. It’s a big sign that it’s reading the room on cheaper open-source models.

More and more US firms are right-sizing their AI needs to lower-cost (and often Chinese-made) open-source AI models, Citi said in a note to clients this summer. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s xAI unit this week announced Grok 4.6, its latest AI model that scores dead even with OpenAI’s top model and just behind Anthropic’s ultra-powerful Opus 5 and Fable 5 Max models on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Worse for Anthropic, xAI boldly broke into the frontier while offering its model at roughly half the cost of Anthropic’s best models, per the index.

Still, everyone is feeling the heat of AI costs these days. Even DeepSeek, which made its name as the first cheap open-source Chinese alternative to expensive flagship US models. On Thursday, the Chinese firm said it is upping the price of its models during “peak hours,” moving from a previous price of $0.87 per 1 million output tokens for the V4-Pro model to $3.96. It will cost half that during non-peak hours. Grok 4.6 is offered at $6, while Claude Opus 5 runs for $25.

The good news for Anthropic? It’s still the clear pack leader in the US:

Finish Line: All roads still lead to an IPO, possibly as soon as October. Investors are expecting the company to float at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, according to a Financial Times report on Thursday, though Anthropic has yet to affix a valuation target of its own. That would beat the record IPO valuation notched in June by SpaceX, which has recently seen its share price rocket 40% above a post-IPO low.