Anthropic has acquired Vercept, a Seattle-based AI startup specializing in computer-use agents, the company announced Wednesday. The acquisition marks Anthropic’s latest move to strengthen Claude’s autonomous task capabilities, following their December purchase of Bun to scale Claude Code. ## The Vercept Story Vercept had developed Vy, a cloud-based computer-use agent capable of operating remote devices like an Apple MacBook. The startup was a graduate of A12 (the AI2 Incubator), spawned from the Allen Institute for AI, and had raised a total of $50 million in funding. The company’s investor list read like a who’s who of tech luminaries: former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi all backed the startup. ## The Team Behind Vercept The acquisition brings several notable researchers to Anthropic, including co-founders Kiana Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick. However, not all original founders are making the transition—one co-founder, Matt Deitke, had already left for Meta’s Superintelligence Lab last year in a deal reportedly worth $250 million. Oren Etzioni, another co-founder and the founding leader of the Allen Institute for AI, is also not joining Anthropic. In a LinkedIn post, Etzioni expressed disappointment that Vercept “threw in the towel” after just over a year, though he noted he received a positive return on his investment. ## What Anthropic Gets Vercept’s technology focused on enabling AI agents to interact with computers autonomously—performing complex, multi-step tasks that require understanding and manipulating graphical user interfaces. This capability is increasingly crucial as AI companies race to build agents that can handle real-world workflows. The acquisition aligns with Anthropic’s strategy of expanding Claude’s computer-use capabilities. The company will shut down Vercept’s product on March 25, transitioning customers to Anthropic’s platform. ## Why This Matters The Vercept acquisition signals the intensifying competition in the computer-use AI space. With companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic all pursuing similar goals, acquisitions of specialized startups have become a key strategy to accelerate development. For enterprises, this means the race to build truly autonomous AI agents that can interact with computers is heating up—and the technology is moving closer to reality.