Anthropic announced its acquisition of Vercept this week, in a move that signals the company’s intent to move further into full computer interaction.

Seattle-based Vercept developed complex agentic tools, including a computer-use agent that could complete tasks inside applications like a person with a laptop would.

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 move is likely to benefit Elon Musk’s competing chatbot, Grok, which the Pentagon plans to give access to classified military networks.

Most investors jumped to a conclusion on Monday that's not supported by all the facts.

Anthropic is acquiring Seattle AI startup Vercept, folding its desktop “computer use” technology and team into Claude as the race to build AI agents that can operate software intensifies.

The company had clashed with the military over how officials wanted to use its cutting-edge A.I. model. The order could vastly complicate intelligence analysis and defense work.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a post announced the decision, asking the Pentagon to stop its contractors and their partners from doing any kind of business with Anthropic.

Jack Clark, Anthropic's head of policy, joins other tech leaders who say they limit their children's screen time.

The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security said in research published Wednesday.

When Hegseth and Amodei met Tuesday, military officials warned that they could designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, cancel its contract or invoke a Cold War-era law called the Defense Production Act to give the military more sweeping authority to use its products, even if the company doesn’t approve.