Replit CEO says the company dropped Anthropic for OpenAI, but the status is disputed
Replit’s CEO cites cost, performance and partnership, while another source disagrees.
Replit co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad said the AI coding company is no longer working with Anthropic and currently regards OpenAI as the better partner. His statement at TechCrunch Disrupt suggests a significant supplier shift, but the position is not settled: a person familiar with the relationship told TechCrunch that the Anthropic partnership remained in place.
Why Masad says Replit changed course
In TechCrunch’s account of the interview, Masad named cost, model performance and the quality of the commercial partnership as the deciding factors. He said Replit’s own testing, alongside public benchmarks, favored OpenAI’s Sol and Astra models for creating applications from scratch through natural-language instructions. TechCrunch did not publish the benchmark design or complete results, so that comparison remains Replit’s claim rather than an independently checkable finding.
The move follows a visible expansion of the OpenAI relationship. In August, Replit introduced Free Mode powered by GPT-5.6 Luna. Everyday tasks in that mode do not consume usage credits, but access comes within a paid Core or Pro subscription and has limits that reset every five hours. OpenAI separately described the same launch as an expansion of access to software building.
What remains unresolved
The claim does not establish that every contractual or technical connection with Anthropic has ended. TechCrunch noted that Replit had described Claude models as production components as recently as September, while its unnamed source directly contradicted Masad. Replit had not clarified the discrepancy when the article was published on October 16.
For customers, the immediate unanswered questions are practical: which models remain available inside Replit, whether existing products will change, and how the company measured the reported performance advantage. Until Replit or Anthropic provides a detailed account, the firm conclusion is narrower than the headline dispute: Replit’s CEO publicly prefers OpenAI, but the formal status and scope of the Anthropic relationship are still unclear.