Anthropic acquired Vercept, a Seattle startup that built AI agents able to see and operate the same software people use, the company announced on 25 February 2026. Anthropic said the deal was meant to push further the computer-use capabilities of its Claude models, which let the model carry out multi-step tasks inside live applications.
The companies did not disclose the price or the form of payment. Vercept co-founders Kiana Ehsani, who was chief executive, Luca Weihs and Ross Girshick joined Anthropic along with the Vercept team.
Vercept said it would wind down its external product in the coming weeks. TechCrunch reported that Vy, its computer-use agent, would close on 25 March, giving customers 30 days to move off the platform.
What Vercept built
Vercept's main product was Vy, a cloud-based agent that could take control of a remote Apple MacBook and complete tasks by reading what was on the screen and clicking and typing the way a person would. Anthropic described the startup's thesis as the view that AI can only become useful for complex tasks once hard problems in perception and interaction are solved.
The company also built VyUI, a model that identifies interface elements on a screen. The Decoder reported that VyUI scored 92% on the ScreenSpot v1 benchmark, against 18.3% for a comparable OpenAI model, and 94.7% on ScreenSpot v2, against 87.9%. On GroundUI Web the gap was smaller, at 84.8% against 82.3%.
The founders had research roots at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), and Vercept was a graduate of the AI2 incubator, according to TechCrunch.
“The choices were clear: we could build independently and work toward the same vision as two separate versions of it, or join forces with an incredible team and accelerate that vision into reality.”
Why Anthropic is buying
Anthropic first released computer use in late 2024. In its announcement it said its Sonnet models had improved from under 15% on OSWorld, a widely used test of how well AI completes real computer tasks, to 72.5% with the recently released Sonnet 4.6. It said the model was approaching human-level performance on tasks such as working through complex spreadsheets and filling in web forms across several browser tabs.
Anthropic said the Vercept team's years of work on how AI systems see and act inside everyday software mapped directly onto some of the hardest problems it was working on. It described Vercept as the latest team it had brought in after its December acquisition of Bun, which it bought to help scale Claude Code, and said it looks for teams whose technical goals and approach to safety match its own.
Ehsani described the decision as a choice between building toward the same goal separately or doing it together. In a LinkedIn post quoted by TechCrunch, she said that once the options were laid out, the decision became an easy choice.
The founders and the funding
Vercept announced a $16 million seed round in January 2025. TechCrunch reported that Seth Bannon of Fifty Years, who sat on Vercept's board, was the lead investor. Angel investors included former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, Cruise founder Kyle Vogt and Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi. Ehsani said the company had raised $50 million in total. Its valuation was not disclosed.
Not every co-founder is moving to Anthropic. Matt Deitke, who joined Meta's superintelligence lab in 2025 after reportedly negotiating a $250 million pay package, congratulated his former colleagues on X. Oren Etzioni, the founding chief executive of AI2 and a University of Washington professor, was also a co-founder and investor and is not joining.
Etzioni criticised the outcome in public. On LinkedIn he wrote that after a little more than a year Vercept was giving up and giving customers 30 days to leave the platform. He told GeekWire, as quoted by TechCrunch, that he had made a positive return but was disappointed that a company with real traction and a strong team was stopping so early. TechCrunch reported that he said Bannon was partly responsible for the company not hiring the right business people; Bannon replied that Etzioni had disparaged the work of founders who achieved an outcome most could only dream of.
What happens to Vy users
Vy is not being folded into an Anthropic product. Vercept said it would wind the service down, and customers had 30 days to leave the platform. Anthropic did not say whether any of Vercept's technology, including VyUI, would be built into Claude, only that the team would work on computer use.
Anthropic presented the deal as part of a wider effort to make Claude better at operating a computer on a person's behalf, and said it was also recruiting individual engineers for its engineering team.
