Replit AI CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said the AI coding platform is no longer working with Anthropic, disclosing the split onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt on October 161. The move follows Replit AI's partnership with OpenAI announced in August, though no prior indication had been given that the Anthropic relationship was ending.
"I think ChatGPT is better now," Masad said, adding that the company uses an internal benchmark to assess metrics such as performance. He cited Replit AI's public benchmark as well, saying Sol and Astra "consistently" outperform 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.
Disputed status
The claim drew immediate pushback. A person familiar with the Anthropic-Replit AI partnership, who asked not to be named, said the partnership was still in place. TechCrunch also noted evidence that Replit AI was using Anthropic products as recently as September.
Under its prior arrangement with Anthropic, Replit AI used Claude models to power its cloud-based software development platform, where users build and deploy apps directly in the browser. That partnership was said to have helped the company grow its revenue significantly.
Shifting model economics
Masad framed the switch as driven by three factors: cost, the strength of the OpenAI partnership, and model performance on Replit AI's own evaluations. The emphasis on vibe-coded application generation as the decisive benchmark aligns with a broader structural shift in which development environments are rebuilding core abstractions around AI coding agents as first-class participants[1].
ANALYSIS The contradiction between Masad's public statement and the unnamed source's insistence that the partnership remains active leaves the operational reality unclear; Replit AI may be transitioning models gradually rather than executing a clean break. Masad's willingness to name specific models, Sol and Astra, and tie the decision to published benchmarks puts direct competitive pressure on Anthropic's Claude lineup in the coding-agent segment, where switching costs for platform providers appear low enough to make model performance the deciding variable.