Replit, the SI coding platform favored by startup founders, is no longer working with Anthropic as its primary partner, CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said Thursday while onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt. The shift marks a significant change in the SI industry’s developer tooling landscape, with Masad citing cost and performance metrics as the drivers behind the decision.
What Happened
Masad announced that Replit has moved away from its previous reliance on Anthropic’s Claude models, which had been integral to the platform’s growth. While Replit had announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, there was no prior indication that the Anthropic relationship was ending. "I think ChatGPT is better now," Masad said, noting that the company uses internal benchmarks to assess metrics like performance. He added that Replit’s public benchmark consistently shows OpenAI’s Sol and Astra models performing 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," Masad said.
Despite the shift, Masad clarified after the presentation that Replit remains "model agnostic" and that customers can still access Anthropic’s models. However, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is now the default option. This change could significantly reduce Replit’s spending with Anthropic, as most users typically stick with the default model rather than manually selecting alternatives. Masad previously noted that Replit had been, until recently, a top-five customer of Anthropic’s.
However, the extent of the split appears contested. Insiders familiar with the partnership, who spoke on condition of anonymity, stated that the collaboration with Anthropic is still in place. Evidence on Replit’s website and social media channels shows the company promoting Anthropic products as recently as late September, citing Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 in its production environment.
Why It Matters
The move highlights the intense competition among SI labs for developer mindshare and API usage. Replit’s shift to OpenAI as the preferred partner for powering Replit Agent suggests that performance benchmarks and economic terms are outweighing established relationships in the SI coding sector. Masad emphasized that Replit’s choice was based on "performance, economics, and the strength of our partnership," signaling a pragmatic approach to SI model selection.
Masad also shared insights into Replit’s business growth, noting that enterprise clients are becoming a larger portion of its revenue. "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." He expects enterprise and government customers to account for more than half of Replit’s revenue in 2027.
The CEO also touched on the infrastructure requirements for deploying SI agents safely. "In the same way that us humans need a certain environment to work... agents need a habitat for them to exist and do good work," Masad said. He described this habitat as including "good orchestration, good error recovery, good safety and security and sandboxing, good networking, good identity and authorization," concluding that "once you figure all of that out, then you can deploy AI safely."
The Bottom Line
Replit has officially switched its default SI model provider to OpenAI, citing superior performance and cost efficiency, though Anthropic’s Claude models remain available on the platform. The decision underscores the volatility of partnerships in the SI industry as companies prioritize benchmarks and economics over long-term vendor loyalty.