Replit CEO says firm cut ties with Anthropic over cost and performance

Replit, the browser-based platform for building and deploying software, is no longer working with Anthropic, the AI lab behind the Claude models, according to the company’s CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad. He made the statement on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday in San Francisco.

Masad said the decision came down to cost, partnership terms, and performance. Replit’s platform lets users describe an app in plain language and have it built automatically, a practice known as vibe coding. Masad said the company tracks performance with an internal benchmark and also publishes a public one, and that two systems he called Sol and Astra have consistently scored better at building vibe-coded apps from scratch than the alternatives Replit had been using. “I think ChatGPT is better now,” Masad said.

Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August. Before that announcement, Replit ran its platform on Anthropic’s Claude models under a separate partnership that the company has said helped drive significant revenue growth. That arrangement was widely seen as one of Anthropic’s most visible coding-platform partnerships. Masad’s comments on Thursday were the first public sign that the Anthropic relationship had ended. He also used his appearance at Disrupt to describe Replit’s shift toward larger customers, saying enterprise contracts made up about 2% of revenue last year and now account for roughly 15%, with business customers overall contributing more than half of Replit’s revenue.

People familiar with the Anthropic-Replit partnership pushed back on Masad’s account. One person, who was not named, said the partnership remains in place. TechCrunch also found evidence that Replit was using Anthropic’s models within the past few weeks: a blog post from late September referenced Claude Fable 5 and Fable 5.1 running inside Replit Agent’s production environment, and a Replit product employee posted on the social platform X around the same time about using Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 model. TechCrunch reached out to Replit for clarification on the apparent contradiction between Masad’s on-stage comments and the company’s recent public use of Anthropic’s models, and had not received a response by publication time.

What happens next will show up in Replit’s own products and public statements rather than in Thursday’s comments alone. Whether Replit updates its blog posts and model lineup to drop Claude entirely, and whether Anthropic issues its own statement on the status of the partnership, will settle which account is accurate.