Anthropic Acquires Vercept but Kills Its Product — Is This Just an Acqui-Hire?

Anthropic has acquired Vercept, a Seattle-based AI startup founded by alumni of the Allen Institute for AI, in a deal that its own co-founder described as "sad." The acquisition raises uncomfortable questions about whether this is a genuine strategic move or simply a talent grab dressed up as a merger.

The Deal: Product Dies, Team Lives On

Vercept's desktop application Vy — which used AI to see and understand screen elements to automate tasks — will shut down in 30 days. Users were told to try Anthropic's Claude tools instead. The startup's technology and an unspecified number of its 20 employees will fold into Anthropic to advance its "computer use" capabilities.

On paper, Anthropic says the acquisition will help Claude complete multi-step tasks inside live applications, from navigating spreadsheets to managing workflows across multiple tools. Vercept's team has "spent years thinking carefully about how AI systems can see and act within the same software humans use every day," Anthropic said in its announcement.

$50 Million Raised, Product Killed in a Year

The numbers tell a troubling story. Vercept closed a $16 million seed round in January 2025 at a $67 million post-money valuation, led by Fifty Years with participation from Point Nine Capital and the AI2 Incubator. Co-founder Kiana Ehsani said the company raised more than $50 million total. The angel investor list was impressive: former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi.

Despite this high-profile backing and what Ehsani described as a "comfortable runway and a successful product," the company lasted barely over a year before being absorbed. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Co-Founder Calls It "Sad"

Seattle AI veteran Oren Etzioni, a Vercept co-founder and the former CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, didn't mince words. He described the outcome as "sad" on LinkedIn, and in a phone interview with GeekWire, he elaborated: "I'm pleased to have gotten a positive return but obviously disappointed that after just a little over a year with so much traction, and such a fantastic team, we're basically throwing in the towel."

Etzioni said he was disappointed with aspects of how the acquisition process unfolded. Meanwhile, lead investor Seth Bannon of Fifty Years responded to Etzioni's public criticism with a passage from Theodore Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" — a quote typically cited in moments of public scrutiny or setback.

The Talent Drain Was Already Happening

The cracks were visible before the acquisition. Co-founder Matt Deitke, known for leading AI2 projects including Molmo and Objaverse, left Vercept in mid-2025 after Meta reportedly offered him $250 million over four years to join its Superintelligence Lab. When your co-founder leaves for a quarter-billion-dollar offer, it signals something about the startup's trajectory.

A Crowded Field Gets More Crowded

Vercept claimed its VyUI model outperformed models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic on UI grounding benchmarks. But superior benchmarks didn't save the company. The AI agent space has become fiercely competitive, with OpenAI's Operator, Google's Project Mariner, Amazon's Nova Act, Microsoft's Copilot, and open-source projects like OpenClaw all fighting for the same territory.

The remaining co-founders — Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick — framed the deal as mission-driven rather than financial, saying their mission had "found a bigger home" at Anthropic. But when a startup with $50 million in funding and benchmark-beating technology can't survive independently for more than a year, it reveals just how brutal the AI agent arms race has become.

The Bottom Line

Anthropic gets a team of world-class computer vision researchers who built technology specifically designed for the "computer use" problem it's trying to solve. But Vercept's investors and early supporters might reasonably wonder why a company with that much talent, funding, and technical prowess couldn't build a sustainable independent business. The AI industry's acqui-hire machine continues to run at full speed, and it's the startups — and their broader ecosystems — that keep getting ground up in the process.