By Hamza Faisal

Replit, the AI coding platform that has become a favorite of startup founders and developers, is no longer working with Anthropic.

That is according to Replit's CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad, who made the claim onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt, saying the split came down to cost, partnership, and model performance — and adding, pointedly: "I think ChatGPT is better now."

Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, but until now there had been no indication that its relationship with Anthropic had ended.

Under the earlier arrangement, Replit ran its platform on Anthropic's Claude models, a partnership reported to have helped the company grow its revenue significantly.

"I think ChatGPT is better now"

Masad said Replit judges models with an internal benchmark called VBench alongside a public benchmark the company publishes.

"We publish a public benchmark as well, and consistently, Sol and Astra perform better on building vibe-coded applications from scratch," he said.

"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."

Sol and Astra are OpenAI models, and Masad framed the switch as pragmatic rather than ideological — better performance on the workloads that matter to Replit's users, at a price the company can live with.

Insiders dispute the claim

Not everyone agrees the breakup happened.

A person familiar with the Anthropic–Replit partnership, who asked not to be named, told TechCrunch the partnership was still in place.

Public evidence gives the denial some weight: a Replit blog post in late September cited Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 as models running in Replit Agent's production environment, and around the same time a Replit product employee posted on X about using Anthropic's flagship model Opus 5.5.

TechCrunch said it had reached back out to Replit for clarification.

The dispute leaves one of the industry's highest-profile model-provider divorces in an awkward limbo — announced by a CEO onstage, denied by an insider off the record, with the truth likely buried in contract language neither side will discuss.

A top-five customer walks away

If Masad's version holds, Anthropic has just lost a major account.

Masad said Replit was one of Anthropic's top five customers, a claim that lands as the AI lab faces fresh scrutiny over its revenue growth and a possible mega-valuation IPO.

Masad also used the stage to talk up Replit's own trajectory.

Enterprise contracts now make up about 15 percent of the company's revenue, up from roughly 2 percent last year, and business-to-business sales account for more than half of total revenue.

He declined to share annual recurring revenue figures.

And he dismissed the idea that Replit itself is vulnerable to disruption from the model labs it partners with.

OpenAI and Anthropic's moves into building, deploying, and hosting apps remain "surface level" next to Replit's full-stack environment, he argued — noting that OpenAI relies on an outside service, Cloudflare, for hosting, while Replit's agents can spin up databases and key-value stores inside production environments,

and the entire stack can be deployed on-premises for government and enterprise customers.

By Hamza Faisal