Claude AI maker Anthropic acquires Vercept
Anthropic’s acquisition of Vercept is meant to accelerate the development of Claude’s computer-use capabilities.
Anthropic, the AI research firm behind the Claude models, has announced its acquisition of Vercept, a startup focused on advanced software interaction.
This move is meant to accelerate the development of Claude’s computer-use capabilities, allowing the artificial intelligence (AI) assistant to navigate and operate software applications with human-level proficiency.
By integrating Vercept’s specialised expertise, Anthropic aims to move beyond simple chat interfaces toward agents that can execute multi-step tasks across various platforms.
Anthropic stands to gain significant technical depth in perception and interaction. While recent versions of the Claude model have already demonstrated substantial progress in computer use, reaching a 72.5% success rate on the OSWorld evaluation, the acquisition of Vercept is expected to push these frontiers even further.
The Vercept team has spent years researching how AI can see and act within the same software environments used by humans.
“That means Claude can take on multi-step tasks in live applications, and solve problems impossible with code alone. Today, we are announcing that Anthropic has acquired Vercept to help us push those capabilities further,” Anthropic said in a post.
For Vercept, the deal represents a transition from an independent startup to an integrated part of a leading AI laboratory. The company will wind down its external product offerings in the coming weeks as the team joins Anthropic’s engineering department.
Kiana Ehsani, Co-founder of Vercept, noted that the decision was driven by a strong alignment of values and a shared mission to expand human potential through safe technology.
“The more we talked, the more we realised we had been working on the same mission but from complementary perspectives. We realised that joining forces meant we could build something much much bigger together,” she explained.
Vercept was founded by Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick. The startup initially launched with a vision to move technology beyond traditional inputs like the keyboard and mouse.
The Vercept team raised over $50 million in funding. This included a $16 million seed round led by the venture firm Fifty Years, with participation from Point Nine and several prominent angel investors.
Ehsani described the startup’s journey as a high-adrenaline experience that involved constant learning and experimentation.
The acquisition follows Anthropic’s purchase of Bun in December, indicating a pattern of bringing in highly technical teams to refine their frontier models.
“We look for teams whose technical ambitions match ours, whose work advances our capabilities, and whose approach to building AI is grounded in the same principles of safety and rigor that guide everything we do,” Anthropic explained.
While Vercept’s existing customers will see the platform close, the founders believe the move will ultimately serve a broader community. Vercept had previously expressed a commitment to ensuring that the future of AI serves everyone, particularly those often overlooked by the tech industry.
Reflecting on the transition, the Vercept team said on social media, “A belief that responsible development matters and that the future we are building should serve everyone, including communities that are too often left behind. To our incredible team, this is a reflection of the culture you built.”
Through this merger, Anthropic continues to consolidate its position as a primary developer of autonomous digital agents.
Earlier this month, the AI research firm raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round, taking its post-money valuation to $380 billion. Anthropic said the investment will accelerate frontier research, product development, and infrastructure expansion.
In under three years, the company said, it has grown its revenue run-rate to $14 billion, maintaining a consistent growth rate of over 10x annually during that period. This rapid expansion is particularly evident in the high-end enterprise market.
A primary catalyst for this success is the emergence of agentic coding. Claude Code, which was launched publicly in mid-2025, has already reached a revenue run-rate of $2.5 billion dollars, according to Anthropic.
Edited by Megha Reddy