Replit CEO Says Company Has Ended Its Partnership With Anthropic in Favor of OpenAI

Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, the AI coding platform’s CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said Thursday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. The announcement came as a surprise, as there had been no prior indication the company had parted ways with the AI lab.

Masad cited cost, performance, and partnership terms as the reasons behind the decision. “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,” he said, referring to OpenAI. Replit had announced a partnership with OpenAI in August 2026. Under its previous arrangement with Anthropic, Replit used the lab’s Claude models to power its platform — a partnership credited with helping the company grow its revenue significantly.

Masad also pointed to internal and public benchmarks favoring OpenAI’s models. “I think ChatGPT is better now,” he said. “Consistently, Sol and Astra perform better on building vibe-coded applications from scratch.”

However, the announcement was met with pushback. At least one person familiar with the Anthropic-Replit partnership, who asked not to be named, told TechCrunch the partnership was still in place. A Replit blog post from September 2026 also cited Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 as models running in Replit Agent’s production environment. TechCrunch said it had reached out to Replit for clarification.

Masad also shared revenue details during the appearance, noting that enterprise contracts have grown from roughly 2% of revenue last year to about 15% in 2026, with more than 50% of revenue now coming from B2B customers.

The conflicting accounts leave the current status of Replit’s relationship with Anthropic unclear. If confirmed, the shift would mark a significant change for a platform that built much of its AI capabilities on Claude models.