Replit makes OpenAI its default over Anthropic, CEO says
Replit, the AI coding platform that has become a favorite of startup founders and developers, is no longer working with Anthropic, the company’s CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said Thursday while onstage atTechCrunch Disrupt. Masad said the decision was made for a number of different reasons, including cost. Replitannounceda partnership with OpenAI in August, but there was never any indication that it was no longer partnering with Anthropic. “I think ChatGPT is better now,” Masad said, adding that the company uses an internal benchmark to help assess metrics like performance. “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.” It seems, however, that Anthropic hasn’t been completely cut out of Replit, which sells a cloud-based software development platform where users can develop and deploy apps directly from inside their browser. After Disrupt, Masad clarified that customers can still access Anthropic models on the platform, but that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is now the default. This shift could significantly reduce Replit’s spend with Anthropic since most customers stick with the default rather than selecting a model themselves. Prior to striking a deal with OpenAI, Replit relied on Anthropic’s Claude models to run its platform. That partnership was said to havehelpedthe company grow its revenue significantly, and Masad noted on stage that Replit had been, until recently, a top-five customer of Anthropic’s. “Replit remains model agnostic,” Masad told TechCrunch over the weekend. “Our users can choose Anthropic’s Claude or other supported models…OpenAI is now our preferred partner for powering Replit Agent, based on performance, economics, and the strength of our partnership.” Masad’s comments on stage were rejected by insiders familiar with the partnership between the Anthropic and Replit, however. One person familiar, who asked not to be named, said the partnership was still in place. There is evidence onthe company’s website, blog posts, and social media posts that Replit was promoting Anthropic products as recently as a few weeks ago. For instance, ablog postin late September cites Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 as models running in Replit Agent’s production environment. Around the same time, one of Replit’s product employeespostedon X about using Anthropic’s flagship model Opus 5.5 and promoting its capabilities. Masad also shared insights about the company’s growth while onstage at Disrupt, noting that enterprise is starting to provide a larger slice of revenue. “We’re not sharing ARR numbers just yet, but in terms of growth, like, I would say, enterprise was like 2% of revenue last year,” Masad said. “This year, I would say like 15% of our revenue is enterprise contracts, and more than 50% of our revenue is B2B.” Backstage, Masad told TechCrunch that he expects more than half of Replit’s revenue to come from enterprise and government customers in 2027. Masad also commented on the necessity for good AI safety measures. “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.” This article was originally published on October 16 at 2:22 pm PT. It has been updated to include more context around Replit’s partnerships with Anthropic and OpenAI.
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