ChatGPT rival Anthropic buys Seattle AI startup
Feb 27, 2026, 3:16 PM
In this illustration, the Claude AI website is seen on a laptop on February 16, 2026. (Photo illustration: Michael M. Santiago, Getty Images)
(Photo illustration: Michael M. Santiago, Getty Images)
A Seattle startup just got bought up by a major player in artificial intelligence.
Seattle-based Vercept is joining ChatGPT rival Anthropic, Vercept announced on its website Wednesday.
“From our earliest conversations, it was clear that Anthropic shares our conviction that AI should be both useful and responsible,” Vercept stated. “Their commitment to building safe, steerable AI systems lines up with the principles that have guided us from the start. Together, we’ll be able to push further into what’s possible at the intersection of AI and the personal computing experience.”
San Francisco-based Anthropic is the producer of the popular AI model Claude.
The company wrote on its website that the merger with Vercept made sense to take Claude to the next level.
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Vercept’s roots in Seattle’s AI scene
Vercept was founded in 2024 with the belief that making “AI genuinely useful for completing complex tasks requires solving hard perception and interaction problems,” Anthropic stated.
According to The Puget Sound Business Journal, 10 employees from Vercept will join Anthropic.
Vercept has been called a Seattle tech infrastructure success story, born out of a tech incubator spun off from the Allen Institute for AI. The company raised $16 million last year.
The value of the sale was not disclosed, nor was the future of the Vercept tech.
Anthropic noted Vercept is the latest tech company it acquired, following its purchase of Bun.
Contributing: Jillian Raftery, KIRO Newsradio; Julia Dallas, MyNorthwest
