Replit, the AI coding platform popular with startup founders and developers, is no longer working with Anthropic, CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said Thursday onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt. Masad cited cost as one of several reasons for the decision, and said the company now favors OpenAI's ChatGPT.
The announcement came as a surprise because Replit had announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, but had given no indication that its relationship with Anthropic had ended. The move highlights growing competition among AI model providers to power developer tools.
Why Replit chose ChatGPT over Anthropic
Masad said the decision was based on cost, partnership, and performance. "I think ChatGPT is better now," he said, adding that Replit uses an internal benchmark to 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," Masad said, referring to OpenAI models.
Under its previous partnership with Anthropic, Replit used the AI lab's Claude models to run its platform, a collaboration that was said to have significantly boosted Replit's revenue. Masad's comments suggest that Replit now relies on OpenAI's technology instead.
Anthropic partnership dispute
Insiders familiar with the matter pushed back on Masad's claim, however. One person, who asked not to be named, said the partnership between Anthropic and Replit was still in place. TechCrunch also found evidence on Replit's website, blog posts, and social media indicating that the company was using Anthropic products as recently as a few weeks ago.
For instance, a late-September blog post cited Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 as models running in Replit Agent's production environment. Around the same time, a Replit product employee posted on X about using Anthropic's flagship model Opus 5.5 and promoting its capabilities. TechCrunch reached out to Replit for clarification and will update the story if it hears back.
