Anthropic announced Wednesday it has acquired Vercept, a Seattle-based AI startup specializing in computer-use agents, marking its second major acquisition in three months as the Claude maker accelerates development of AI systems that can navigate desktop applications like humans. The deal comes after Meta poached one of Vercept's co-founders for its Superintelligence Lab with a reported $250 million compensation package.
$50M Raised, Product Shutting Down March 25
Vercept CEO Kiana Ehsani disclosed the startup had raised a total of $50 million since inception, including a $16 million seed round in January 2025 led by Fifty Years' Seth Bannon. The investor roster included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, according to reports from TechCrunch and GeekWire.
As part of the acquisition, Anthropic will shutter Vercept's existing product Vy on March 25, giving current customers 30 days to migrate off the platform. Vy was a cloud-based agent capable of remotely operating macOS environments using computer vision rather than traditional API integrations.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 Jumps to 72.5% on OSWorld Benchmark
The acquisition follows Anthropic's recent launch of Claude Sonnet 4.6, which demonstrated major improvements in computer-use capabilities. On OSWorld, a widely-used evaluation for AI computer use, Anthropic's Sonnet models jumped from under 15% accuracy in late 2024 when the feature first launched to 72.5% today, approaching human-level performance on tasks like navigating complex spreadsheets and completing web forms across multiple browser tabs.
"People are using Claude for increasingly complex work—writing and running code across entire repositories, synthesizing research from dozens of sources, and managing workflows that span multiple tools and teams," Anthropic stated. "Computer use enables Claude to do all of that inside live applications, the way a person at a keyboard would."
Not All Co-Founders Joining Anthropic
Anthropic confirmed co-founders Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick will join the company to advance computer-use capabilities. However, not all of Vercept's co-founders are making the transition.
Oren Etzioni, well-known in Seattle as the founding leader of the Allen Institute for AI and previously identified as a Vercept co-founder and investor, will not join Anthropic. Etzioni posted on LinkedIn: "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!"
More notably, co-founder Matt Deitke also will not join Anthropic. Deitke made headlines last year as one of the AI researchers who negotiated a $250 million salary from Meta to join its Superintelligence Lab, according to multiple reports.
Public Investor Spat on LinkedIn
The acquisition sparked a public dispute between investors on Etzioni's LinkedIn post. Etzioni accused lead investor Bannon of being "partly responsible" for Vercept not hiring the correct business people. Bannon fired back, condemning Etzioni's remarks: "you disparaged the heroic work of the founders for achieving an outcome most could only dream of."
Second Acquisition Following Bun in December
This marks Anthropic's second acquisition after purchasing coding agent engine Bun in December to help scale Claude Code. Financial terms of the Vercept deal were not disclosed, though Etzioni confirmed he received a positive return on his investment.
