Replit drops Anthropic for OpenAI, CEO cites cost and performance as Claude supplier also sells competing coding agent

Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad announced Thursday onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt. The AI coding platform, which ran its browser-based development environment on Anthropic's Claude models, has moved on after a partnership that reportedly helped the company grow revenue significantly.

Masad described the split as "a decision based on both cost, you know, partnership, and performance" and added that "I think ChatGPT is better now." Replit had already announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, though until Masad's remarks there had been no public indication the Anthropic relationship had ended. Masad said Replit uses internal benchmarks to assess model performance and claimed its own models, Sol and Astra, "consistently perform better on building vibe-coded applications from scratch."

The structure the breakup exposes is larger than either company. Anthropic sells Claude through an API while simultaneously shipping Claude Code, a coding agent that competes directly with Replit's product. Every API customer that builds on Claude finances the development of a rival built on the same compute. OpenAI runs the same play with its own developer tools, as does Google. The labs' product arms are their API customers' competitors, and the customers keep paying.

What keeps this market honest is not regulation but the near-zero cost of switching. Replit swapped frontier-model suppliers and its product kept working; Masad's benchmark talk and cost complaints are the pricing conversation the three dominant vendors would otherwise never have. A customer with a real alternative can walk, and one just did.

Anthropic's side of the story is murkier. Masad's comments were met with pushback from people familiar with the partnership, one of whom said it was still in place, and a Replit blog post from September cited Claude models running in Replit Agent's production environment. TechCrunch reached out to Replit for clarification and will update if it hears back. Masad, meanwhile, declined to share ARR numbers "just yet," noting that enterprise went from about 2 percent of revenue last year to roughly 15 percent this year, with more than half of revenue now B2B.

A CEO announcing a supplier breakup that the supplier's insiders say hasn't happened is the kind of negotiation that only works when the supplier knows the customer can actually leave.