The announcement was made on Wednesday (US time), marking Anthropic's latest deal after the company acquired Bun programming tools at the end of last year to expand Claude Code.
Although the financial terms are not disclosed, the deal shows ambition to strengthen the AI research team applying computers.
Vercept develops AI tools to serve complex tasks, notably the product Vy, which is a virtual assistant that can operate computers remotely on a cloud platform, including Apple MacBook devices.
This is a development direction that is attracting many technology companies, with the goal of redefining personal computers in the AI assistant era.
According to the agreement, Anthropic will stop operating Vercept's products from March 25.
Vercept was founded from A12, a startup incubator program on AI in Seattle, linked to the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a non-profit artificial intelligence research institute located in the same city (USA).
The co-founders were former researchers here, creating a solid professional foundation.
Vercept CEO Kiana Ehsani said the company has raised a total of 50 million USD, with the main investor being Seth Bannon. The list of investors is also very noteworthy, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi.
One of the co-founders of Vercept, Matt Deitke, once attracted attention when joining Meta with a package of incentives said to be up to 250 million USD to work at the company's super-intellectual lab.
After the deal, some Vercept members will join Anthropic, including Ehsani, Luca Weihs and Ross Girshick.
However, the famous Seattle founder Oren Etzioni, who was also an investor but did not participate, expressed disappointment.
He said that the company closing products after more than a year of operation is regrettable, although the technical team is highly appreciated.
Etzioni also criticized the main investor Seth Bannon for believing that Vercept had not built a suitable business team. The two sides then had a public debate on LinkedIn, a social network specializing in careers and recruitment, with many mutual accusations.
However, Etzioni admitted that he has recovered investment capital and achieved profits. According to him, the most important motivation of the deal is that Anthropic wants to attract research teams, especially in the context that AI talents are being hunted by large corporations.
Contrary to the controversy, Vercept's leadership is positive about the deal. CEO Ehsani said that choosing to join Anthropic helps the company achieve a faster vision instead of developing independently for a long time.
Instead of competing individually, potential startups are now often merged with technology giants to take advantage of resources, data and infrastructure, which are key factors in the global technology race.
