An efficiency layer is one of the few acquisitions where the buyer can check the arithmetic before signing. You know your compute bill and your utilisation rate, and a vendor promising to "squeeze every ounce of performance from every chip" [6] is making a claim that shows up in a line of your own accounts. Anthropic ran that check to the end of diligence and passed [1].
What ownership adds, on top of the saving, is exclusivity and control of the roadmap. A supply agreement gets the saving on its own, for a fraction of the money. When the acquired thing never touches a customer, the gap between those two prices is mostly what you are paying to stop someone else buying the same discount. Decart's stack sits under both training and inference and was meant to let Anthropic's existing compute absorb more demand [5], which per Bloomberg's reporting made this a deal about the cost of serving customers rather than entry into a new product category [7].
Anthropic's most notable acquisition to date was $400m for a team of fewer than ten people [8]. Against that, around $6bn [2] is roughly fifteen times its largest deal so far [21], and about $2bn over the valuation Decart's May round set [22], a mark-up of roughly half in four months [13]. A company close to a listing wants a cost base that looks efficient and an acquisition history that looks disciplined, and buying Decart would have improved the first while complicating the second [15]. Reporting does not say which of those considerations ended the talks, or whether the sticking point was price or something diligence turned up [14].
Gizmodo, which read the original Bloomberg story as the kind of anonymously sourced piece that might exist to help one side in a negotiation [20], supplies the right discount on the $6bn figure: someone with a use for it put it in circulation. Both accounts agree on the mechanism. The Decart Optimization Stack tunes the interaction between AI hardware and software to cut compute cost [19], and no user of the product ever sees it.
What separates ownership from a contract in a case like this comes down to whether most of the benefit is available by agreement, and whether a customer ever touches the thing. Decart's own two halves land on opposite sides of that line: Lucy takes live video of a person and generates high-resolution video of them wearing something they are not, with eBay as both investor and customer [17], while the optimisation stack is a cost line [19]. Anthropic wanted the invisible half [5]. The version of this decision that survives a board meeting starts with the licence quote and treats the gap up to the purchase price as the cost of exclusivity. Paying an equity multiple for a discount only makes sense if the buyer can name the rival who would otherwise have licensed the same stack.
