Replit Exits Anthropic Partnership, Shifts to OpenAI as CEO Cites Cost and Performance
Replit, the AI coding platform popular among startup founders and developers, is no longer working with Anthropic, according to CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad, who made the announcement Thursday onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Masad attributed the decision to multiple factors, including cost. Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, but the company had not previously indicated it was ending its relationship with Anthropic.
"I think ChatGPT is better now," Masad said, adding that Replit uses an internal benchmark to assess metrics such as performance. "We publish a public benchmark as well, and consistently, Sol and Astra perform better on building vibe-coded applications from scratch. It was a decision based on both cost, you know, partnership, and performance. And for all these reasons, we just felt like they were a better partner for now."
What Replit Does β and Why the Anthropic Partnership Mattered
Replit sells a cloud-based software development platform that lets users develop and deploy apps directly from inside their browsers. Under its partnership with Anthropic, Replit used the AI lab's Claude models to run its platform. That partnership was said to have helped the company grow its revenue significantly.
Pushback From Insiders
Masad's comments drew some pushback from insiders familiar with the Anthropic-Replit partnership. One person familiar, who asked not to be named, said the partnership was still in place.
There is also evidence that Replit was using Anthropic products as recently as September. A blog post from that month cites Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 as models running in Replit Agent's production environment.
TechCrunch reached back out to Replit for clarification and will update this story upon response.
Enterprise Revenue Is Growing
Masad also shared insights about Replit's growth while onstage at Disrupt, noting that enterprise is starting to account for a larger slice of revenue.
"We're not sharing ARR numbers just yet, but in terms of growth, like, I would say, enterprise was like 2% of revenue last year," Masad said. "This year, I would say like 15% of our revenue is enterprise contracts, and more than 50% of our revenue is B2B."
Masad on AI Safety
Masad also commented on the necessity for robust AI safety measures, framing the challenge in terms of giving AI agents a suitable environment in which to operate.
"In the same way that us humans need a certain environment to work β you need a nice office, maybe nice good food in the office, air conditioning, computer β agents need a habitat for them to exist and do good work," he said. "So that habitat has good orchestration, good error recovery, good safety and security and sandboxing, good networking, good identity and authorization. And once you figure all of that out, then you can deploy AI safely."
via TechCrunch AI