Anthropic PBC has acquired Vercept Inc., a startup with an artificial intelligence tool that can automate multistep tasks.

The company didn’t disclose the financial terms in its announcement of the deal today. Vercept previously raised more than $50 million from Google LLC Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean and other high-profile backers.

Vercept’s first investor was a Seattle-based startup incubator called AI2 Incubator. The organization started out as a unit of the Allen Institute for AI, a prominent nonprofit AI lab. Vercept’s co-founders worked at the lab as researchers before launching the startup in 2024.

The company developed a desktop application called Vy that can automatically perform tasks on the user’s behalf. For example, a worker could instruct the tool to summarize a collection of locally stored documents and enrich the outline with information from the web. Vy fine-tunes the way it carries out tasks by observing how users perform them.

Vercept has reportedly informed customers that it will sunset the tool within 30 days. The company is recommending that they switch to Anthropic’s Claude.

In a blog post, Anthropic stated that the acquisition will help it improve Claude’s computer use capabilities. Many of those capabilities are available through a desktop application called Claude Cowork that debuted last month. It can interact with files on the host machine, browse the web and run user-created plugins.

A recent update to Claude Cowork caused a major selloff in enterprise software shares. In late January, Anthropic released more than a half dozen plugins designed to automate common tasks across fields such as sales and project management. In the days that followed the launch, software companies with products focused on those tasks lost billions of dollars in market value. 

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

Claude Cowork also faces competition from other market players. Perplexity AI Inc. today introduced a new agentic automation tool, Perplexity Computer, that 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 Vercept deal is Anthropic’s second acquisition since launch. In December, it bought the startup behind Bun, an open-source JavaScript runtime. Developers use the software to build, test and run JavaScript applications. Anthropic stated at the time of the deal that the company’s technology will help enhance its Claude Code programming tools.

Image: Anthropic