Anthropic announced Wednesday it has acquired Vercept, a Seattle-based artificial intelligence startup specializing in “computer-use” agents, marking its second major acquisition in three months.
The deal follows Anthropic’s December purchase of coding engine Bun and aims to accelerate the development of agentic capabilities for its Claude AI platform. Vercept is best known for Vy, a cloud-based agent capable of remotely operating macOS environments. Anthropic confirmed it will shutter Vercept’s existing product line on March 25, giving current customers 30 days to migrate off the platform.
Vercept CEO Kiana Ehsani stated the startup had raised a total of $50 million since its inception, including a $16 million seed round in January 2025 led by A12’s Seth Bannon. The company’s investor pool included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, according to reporting by TechCrunch and GeekWire.
The acquisition has drawn public criticism from Vercept co-founder and investor Oren Etzioni, the founding leader of the Allen Institute for AI. Etzioni described the deal as “throwing in the towel” despite the company’s technical traction. A public dispute on LinkedIn between Etzioni and lead investor Seth Bannon followed the announcement, with Etzioni citing a lack of business-side hiring as a factor in the early exit.
Key members of the Vercept technical team, including co-founders Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick, will join Anthropic. Other co-founders, including Etzioni and Matt Deitke—who recently joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab—will not move to the acquiring company. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, though Etzioni confirmed the deal provided a positive return for investors.
Anthropic is a San Francisco-based AI safety and research company backed by multi-billion dollar investments from Amazon and Google. The company competes directly
Featured image credit
