Anthropic buys Vercept, shutters product in talent-focused deal

On Wednesday, Anthropic announced its acquisition of Vercept, a Seattle-based artificial intelligence startup. As part of the transaction, Anthropic plans to shutter Vercept’s product on March 25, giving customers 30 days to get off the platform. Vercept, which launched out of the incubator AI2—the parent organization of which is the Allen Institute for AI—had raised a total of $50 million, including a $16 million seed round announced last January. The startup was known for building computer-use agents, which are AI software tools capable of operating a computer interface.

The transaction appears to be an “acqui-hire”—a deal primarily motivated by the desire to secure a target company’s talent rather than its product. Anthropic perhaps wanted the Vercept researchers, especially as competition for AI talent intensifies. This high-stakes environment was recently highlighted when former Vercept co-founder Matt Deitke negotiated a $250 million salary to join Meta. While co-founders Kiana Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick are joining Anthropic, Deitke and co-founder Oren Etzioni are not.

The acquisition has triggered a public dispute between Vercept’s early backers. Etzioni, who is also an investor in the startup, expressed disappointment over the quick exit. On LinkedIn, Etzioni wrote: “After a little bit more than a year, Vercept is throwing in the towel and giving their customers 30 days to get off the platform. Sad. A fantastic team is joining Anthropic. I wish them the very best!”

In the ensuing discussion, Etzioni accused Bannon, the Vercept lead investor, of being “partly responsible” for Vercept not hiring the correct business people. Bannon defended the founders, arguing that Etzioni’s comments dismissed the significant efforts of the team in securing a successful outcome. The two investors also accused each other of other less savory things like lying and legal threats.

Despite the friction among investors, Vercept CEO Kiana Ehsani defended the transition. Ehsani stated that the startup faced a choice between building independently toward the same vision or joining forces with Anthropic to accelerate that vision into reality, calling the acquisition an easy choice. The team will now join Anthropic to continue their work on agentic tasks.

Why it matters

Anthropic is aggressively consolidating talent in the competitive AI agent space, marking its second acquisition in recent months following the purchase of the coding agent engine Bun in December.