Anthropic's Decart Talks Show the AI Fight Has Moved to Cost

Anthropic is in talks to pay $6 billion for Decart, a startup whose software improves chip efficiency and lowers the cost of training and running AI models, Bloomberg reported on Thursday ^[1]. For a company built on selling the most capable models, the choice of target says the fight has moved to the price of inference, and buyers of AI compute should read it the same way.

The pressure is visible in the price sheets. SpaceX's xAI unit this week released Grok 4.6, which scores level with OpenAI's top model and just behind Anthropic's Opus 5 and Fable 5 Max on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, while selling at roughly half the cost of Anthropic's best models ^[3][4]. On a per-token basis Grok 4.6 is offered at $6 against $25 for Claude Opus 5 ^[5], so Anthropic charges about four times as much for output that ranks only modestly higher ^[6]. Citi told clients this summer that more US firms are moving to lower-cost, often Chinese-made open-source models ^[2].

Even the cheap end is repricing. DeepSeek, the Chinese firm that made its name undercutting US flagships, said on Thursday it will raise peak-hour output pricing on its V4-Pro model from $0.87 to $3.96 per million tokens, with off-peak rates at half that ^[7]. That is roughly a 4.5x jump ^[8]. When the discount leader lifts its floor, Anthropic's efficiency shopping looks less like a moat and more like table stakes.

Anthropic negotiates from strength. Expense platform Ramp put its share of US business spending on AI subscriptions and tokens at 43% in July, up from 21% in January, ahead of a declining OpenAI at 40% and far above Google's 6% and xAI's 4% ^[9]. Ramp also found 55% of US businesses now pay for AI tools, up from 47% in January and 44% a year earlier ^[10]. That is a doubling of Anthropic's share in six months against a growing base ^[11].

The backdrop is a pending IPO, possibly as soon as October, with investors expecting a valuation of $2 trillion or more, according to a Financial Times report on Thursday, though Anthropic has set no target of its own ^[12]. That would top the record IPO valuation SpaceX set in June ^[13].

Watch whether a Decart deal actually closes and, more to the point, whether it turns up as lower published token prices rather than wider margins. Buyers signing multi-year compute commitments should assume the cost curve keeps falling and price their contracts to that, not to today's rate card.