Replit drops Anthropic, CEO picks OpenAI over Claude — SkimNews
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- Amjad Masad said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt that Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, citing cost, partnership, and performance as the reasons for the shift
- Masad said OpenAI's ChatGPT is "better now" and that Replit's internal and public benchmarks show Sol and Astra consistently outperform on building vibe-coded applications from scratch
- Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, but the article notes there was never any public indication it had stopped working with Anthropic until Masad's Disrupt remarks
- Insiders familiar with the partnership pushed back on Masad's claim, telling TechCrunch the Anthropic-Replit deal is still in place
- A September blog post cited Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 as models running in Replit Agent's production environment, evidence of continued Anthropic use weeks before the Disrupt appearance
- Masad said enterprise revenue grew from roughly 2% last year to about 15% this year, with more than 50% of revenue now B2B
- Masad argued AI agents need a "habitat" with orchestration, error recovery, sandboxing, and identity/authorization to be deployed safely
Why it matters: The contradiction between Masad publicly declaring the Anthropic split and insiders insisting the partnership remains active — compounded by a September blog post citing Claude models in Replit's production environment — leaves enterprise customers uncertain about which AI models actually power their workflows and how seriously to take the CEO's public partnership claims.
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