Anthropic Acquires Vercept to Boost Claude’s Computer Interaction Skills
Vercept will wind down its external product operations over the coming weeks as its technology and experts integrate with Anthropic’s development efforts.
Anthropic has acquired Seattle-based AI startup Vercept, marking a strategic move to advance its Claude artificial intelligence models’ ability to operate within live software environments and complete complex, multi-step tasks.
The acquisition results from growing industry competition to build AI that can navigate real applications much like a human user.
Anthropic said the Vercept team, including co-founders Kiana Ehsani, Luca Weihs and Ross Girshick, will join its ranks to bolster its “computer use” capabilities — an area focused on enabling AI to perceive and interact with graphical user interfaces instead of relying solely on text or code.
Under the deal, Vercept will wind down its external product operations over the coming weeks as its technology and experts integrate with Anthropic’s development efforts.
"When the opportunity came to join forces with Anthropic. We already knew how great Anthropic was at building models and we admired their mission, but then we learned more about the vision. We went on hours of walks, had long conversations, talked to members across different orgs, and learned more about Anthropic's vision and commitment to core beliefs which were very similar to ours. The more we talked, the more we realised we had been working on the same mission but from complementary perspectives. We realised that joining forces meant we could build something much much bigger together," Ehsani said.
“People are using Claude for increasingly complex work, writing and running code across entire repositories, synthesising research from dozens of sources, and managing workflows that span multiple tools and teams,” Anthropic said in its announcement. “Computer use enables Claude to do all of that inside live applications, the way a person at a keyboard would.”
Vercept’s expertise in solving perception and interaction challenges maps directly onto some of Anthropic’s toughest technical problems, the company said. Its acquisition follows the recent launch of Claude Sonnet 4.6, which improved computer-use performance to scores approaching human-level on benchmarks such as OSWorld.
Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal underscores a broader push by AI developers to build more autonomous, capable agents that can act across digital workflows with minimal human intervention.
