Replit Tries a New Model Line

Replit’s chief executive has publicly declared a break with Anthropic, saying the coding platform now prefers OpenAI on cost, performance and partnership terms. The interesting part is not the switch alone. It is that people familiar with the Anthropic relationship disputed that Replit had actually stopped working with the company.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, Replit co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad said Replit was “no longer working with Anthropic” and added that “ChatGPT is better now.” He said Replit uses internal and public benchmarks and that its own systems, Sol and Astra, perform better at building applications from scratch when paired with OpenAI’s models. That is a clear statement of preference. It is not yet a cleanly documented separation.

TechCrunch reported that a person familiar with the Anthropic partnership, speaking anonymously, said the partnership was still in place. The publication also pointed to Replit material published in late September that cited Anthropic models in Replit Agent’s production environment, along with a social post from a Replit product employee highlighting Anthropic’s Opus 5.5. In other words: the CEO says one thing onstage; the recent paper trail says the relationship may be messier than a simple exit.

That matters because model partnerships are not branding exercises. They shape cost of serving users, product performance and who captures the economics when AI coding tools move from founder toy to corporate budget line. Replit’s own numbers suggest that shift is already under way. Masad said enterprise accounted for about 2% of revenue in the prior year and about 15% this year, while more than half of revenue now comes from B2B customers. The denominator is not disclosed, so there is no way to convert those shares into dollars. Still, the mix change is useful. Enterprise buyers tend to care less about model tribalism than uptime, security and a bill they can explain to procurement.

Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August. If Anthropic is being displaced, even partially, that says something about how quickly these model alliances can turn from strategic to transactional. If the older arrangement remains in force in some form, it says something else: AI infrastructure deals are starting to resemble telecom contracts, full of overlap, migration periods and public messaging that runs ahead of operations.

TechCrunch said it asked Replit for clarification. Until that arrives, the narrow fact is that Replit’s CEO has declared a split that others close to the arrangement contest.