Anthropic acquires AI startup Vercept to enhance Claude’s computing capabilities

Anthropic PBC has acquired Vercept Inc., a startup that develops artificial intelligence tools that can automate multi-step tasks.

The company did not disclose financial terms in today’s acquisition announcement. Vercept previously raised more than $50 million from Google LLC CEO Eric Schmidt, Google DeepMind Principal Scientist Jeff Dean, and other notable backers.

Vercept’s first investor was a Seattle-based startup incubator called AI2 Incubator. The organization began as a division of the Allen Institute for AI, a prominent nonprofit AI institute. Vercept’s co-founder worked at the institute as a researcher before launching his startup in 2024.

The company has developed a desktop application called Vy that can automatically perform tasks on your behalf. For example, a worker can instruct the tool to summarize a collection of locally stored documents and enrich that outline with information from the web. Vy observes how users perform tasks and fine-tunes how they are performed.

Vercept reportedly notified customers that the tool would be retired within 30 days. The company recommends switching to Anthropic’s Claude.

in blog postAnthropic said the acquisition will improve Claude’s computing capabilities. Many of these features are available through a desktop application called Claude Cowork, which debuted last month. You can manipulate files on the host machine, browse the web, and run user-written plug-ins.

Claude Cowork’s recent updates caused the enterprise software stock to drop significantly. Late January, Antropic released Over 6 plugins designed to automate common tasks across fields like sales and project management. In the days following launch, software companies with products focused on these tasks lost billions of dollars in market value.

Vercept’s acquisition may be partly a response to the success of OpenClaw, a desktop-based AI program with similar capabilities to Claude Cowork. The creator of this application recently joined OpenAI Group PBC, a rival of Anthropic PBC. The latter company has built its own set of agent automation tools.

Claude Cowork also faces competition from other market participants. Current status of Perplexity AI Inc. introduced Perplexity Computer, a new agent automation tool, can summarize documents, generate code, and perform other tasks. Some of its features are powered by Anthropic’s flagship Claude 4.6 Opus model.

The deal with Vercept is Anthropic’s second acquisition since its launch. In December, Bought The startup behind Bun, an open source JavaScript runtime. Developers use this software to build, test, and run JavaScript applications. Anthropic said at the time of the deal that its technology would help power the Claude Code programming tool.

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