Replit CEO says company has dropped Anthropic for OpenAI, but insiders dispute the claim

Replit has ended its partnership with Anthropic and moved to OpenAI, CEO Amjad Masad said Thursday onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt. The decision came down to cost, partnership dynamics, and model performance, Masad said, adding that internal benchmarks show OpenAI's models outperform Anthropic's on building applications from scratch.

"I think ChatGPT is better now," Masad said. "We publish a public benchmark as well, and consistently, Sol and Astra perform better on building vibe-coded applications from scratch. It was a decision based on both cost, partnership, and performance. And for all these reasons, we just felt like they were a better partner for now."

Replit announced its OpenAI partnership in August but had not previously signaled a break with Anthropic. Under the Anthropic deal, Replit used Claude models to power its cloud-based development platform, a relationship that helped drive significant revenue growth.

Sources familiar with the Anthropic-Replit relationship dispute Masad's characterization. One person, who requested anonymity, said the partnership remains in place. Replit's own channels show active Anthropic usage as recently as late September. A company blog post from that period cites Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 running in Replit Agent's production environment. Around the same time, a Replit product employee posted on X about using Anthropic's flagship Opus 5.5 model and promoting its capabilities.

TechCrunch has reached out to Replit for clarification.

Masad also shared growth figures during his Disrupt appearance. Enterprise revenue has jumped from roughly 2% of total revenue last year to about 15% this year, he said. More than half of Replit's revenue now comes from B2B contracts. The company is not yet disclosing annual recurring revenue numbers.

On AI safety, Masad argued that AI agents need proper infrastructure to operate reliably. "In the same way that us humans need a certain environment to work — you need a nice office, maybe nice good food in the office, air-conditioning, computer — agents need a habitat for them to exist and do good work," he said. "So that habitat has good orchestration, good error recovery, good safety and security and sandboxing, good networking, good identity and authorization. And once you figure all of that out, then you can deploy AI safely."

Replit sells a browser-based software development platform where users can write, run, and deploy applications without local setup. The company has positioned itself as a hub for AI-assisted coding, integrating large language models directly into the development workflow.

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