The key facts

  • Replit CEO Amjad Masad said at TechCrunch Disrupt that the company no longer works with Anthropic, citing reasons: cost, partnership, and performance
  • In August, Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI; Masad said OpenAI models perform better at building apps from scratch on an internal benchmark
  • TechCrunch sources claim the Anthropic partnership is still active; a September Replit blog post mentioned Claude Fable 5 and 5.1 in production in Replit Agent

Masad's statement about the split with Anthropic

Replit CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday that the company no longer partners with Anthropic. He cited several reasons for the decision, including cost. According to him, the company's internal benchmark shows that the Sol and Astra models consistently do a better job of building 'vibe-coded' apps from scratch. 'I think ChatGPT is better right now,' he added, noting that the decision was based on cost, partnership, and performance: 'for all those reasons, we felt they were the better partner right now.'

The OpenAI partnership and Anthropic's role

In August, Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI, but until that point there had been no indication of an end to work with Anthropic. Replit previously used Anthropic's Claude models to power its cloud development platform, and, according to available information, that partnership helped the company significantly grow its revenue.

Conflicting information about the partnership's status

Informed sources contradict Masad's comments: one of them, speaking on condition of anonymity, told TechCrunch that the Anthropic partnership is still in place. In addition, there is evidence that Replit was using Anthropic products as recently as September: a blog post from that month mentioned the Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 models as running in production in Replit Agent. TechCrunch has reached back out to Replit for clarification and will update the story if a response is received.

Business growth and views on AI safety

On the Disrupt stage, Masad also spoke about the company's growth without disclosing ARR figures: while enterprise customers accounted for about 2% of revenue last year, this year, according to him, enterprise contracts make up about 15% of revenue, and more than 50% of revenue is B2B. Speaking about AI safety, he compared agents to people who need a suitable environment: 'agents need a habitat to exist and work well' — with good orchestration, error recovery, security, sandboxing, networking, identity, and authorization. 'Once you have all that in place, you can deploy AI safely,' he concluded.