Replit CEO says the company dropped Anthropic for OpenAI

Replit, the browser-based coding platform popular with startup founders, is no longer working with Anthropic, CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday, TechCrunch reports. Not everyone agrees that's the full story.

Why Masad says Replit switched

Masad gave three reasons: cost, the partnership and performance. "I think ChatGPT is better now," he said, adding that Replit runs an internal benchmark and publishes a public one, and that OpenAI's Sol and Astra models consistently do better at building "vibe-coded" apps from scratch. OpenAI, he said, felt like "a better partner for now", which leaves the door open for a change later.

Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, but until now there had been no sign that Anthropic was on the way out. Replit lets people write, run and deploy apps from a browser, and its AI agent builds software from plain-language prompts, so the underlying model directly shapes what users get.

The claim is disputed

People familiar with the Anthropic relationship pushed back. One of them, speaking anonymously, told TechCrunch the partnership is still in place. TechCrunch also points to recent evidence of Claude in use: a late-September Replit blog post listed Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Fable 5.1 as models running in Replit Agent's production environment, and a Replit product employee posted about using Opus 5.5 around the same time. TechCrunch said it had asked Replit to clarify.

So it's not clear whether Replit has removed Claude entirely or is moving most of its work to OpenAI.

Replit's business

Masad didn't share annual recurring revenue, but said enterprise contracts grew from about 2% of revenue last year to roughly 15% this year, and that more than half of revenue now comes from business customers. He also described what AI agents need to work safely, a "habitat" with good orchestration, error recovery, sandboxing, networking and authorisation.

The model race keeps shifting fast: Google's Gemini 4 Argon is the latest big release, and Anthropic recently gave independent evaluators deeper access to its systems. If you'd rather run models yourself, see our guide to choosing a laptop for local AI.