Replit ends Anthropic work, CEO says, citing cost and performance

Masad said he now believes ChatGPT is better. He said Replit uses an internal benchmark to assess metrics such as performance and also publishes a public benchmark. 'Consistently, Sol and Astra perform better on building vibe-coded applications from scratch,' he said. '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.'

Replit sells a cloud-based software development platform that lets users develop and deploy apps directly from inside their browser. Under its partnership with Anthropic, Replit used the AI lab's Claude models to run its platform. That partnership was said to have helped Replit grow its revenue significantly.

Masad's comments drew 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 evidence Replit was using Anthropic products as recently as September: a September blog post 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 the story if it hears back.

Masad also shared growth figures at Disrupt, saying enterprise is starting to provide 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,' he said. 'This year, I would say like 15% of our revenue is enterprise contracts, and more than 50% of our revenue is B2B.'

He also commented on the need for good AI safety measures. 'In the same way that us humans need a certain environment to work — you need a nice office, maybe nice good food in the office, air conditioning, computer — agents need a habitat for them to exist and do good work,' Masad 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.'

Editor's Summary

Replit CEO Amjad Masad said the AI coding platform has stopped working with Anthropic, citing cost, partnership and performance, and pointing to ChatGPT and benchmark results. A person familiar with the partnership disputed that account, and a September blog post indicated Anthropic models were still in Replit's production environment. Masad also said enterprise contracts and B2B revenue are growing as a share of Replit's business.