Staying the Course
OpenAI & Anthropic remain committed to their divergent strategic visions
OpenAI acqui-hired the personal-finance AI startup Hiro Finance on April 13, bringing its 2026 count of acquisitions to seven. Anthropic has closed one over the same span. The gap between those two numbers continues a trajectory that was already clear at the end of 2025, when OpenAI had closed eight acquisitions on the year and Anthropic had closed two. Through the first four months of 2026, each company has held to its established pattern.
Altman powers on
OpenAI has closed seven acquisitions in the first four months of 2026, already nearing its full-year 2025 total of eight. The current pace extends an acquisition cadence that took hold around April 2025 and has continued without pause. Before that cadence began, OpenAI had closed only three deals in its history: Global Illumination in 2023, followed by Rockset and Multi in 2024.
The 2026 deals span a broad range of categories. The January cohort includes Convogo, an AI consulting firm; Torch Health, a medical records app; and Crixet, a LaTeX editing startup. February brought the acqui-hire of OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent project whose creator joined the company. On March 19, OpenAI announced Astral, a Python performance-tooling startup that the company said would boost Codex. Promptfoo, an AI application testing tool, followed in early April. Both deals point the developer-tooling portfolio at Codex, which OpenAI said reached 2 million weekly active users in March. Most recently, on April 13, OpenAI acqui-hired Hiro Finance, a roughly ten-person personal-finance AI team whose founder, Ethan Bloch, previously built and sold the savings app Digit for more than $200 million.
In December 2025, OpenAI hired Google’s Albert Lee to lead corporate development. The 2025 headline deals had already set the precedent for this year’s pace. OpenAI paid more than $6 billion in May for io, Jony Ive’s AI hardware startup, which remains its largest acquisition to date, and closed a $1.1 billion deal for Statsig in September. A planned $3 billion acquisition of Windsurf fell apart in July.
Amodei holds the line
Anthropic’s single 2026 acquisition, announced on February 25, is Vercept, a roughly nine-person team focused on AI perception and computer-use automation. Anthropic said that the deal would advance Claude’s ability to take on multi-step tasks in live applications, a capability where Claude Sonnet’s score on the OSWorld benchmark had risen from under 15% in late 2024 to 72.5% by the time of the announcement.