Replit Abandons Anthropic, Puts Its Entire AI Betting on OpenAI
In one of the most visible model-alignment decisions in the AI industry this month, Replit announced it will end its collaboration with Anthropic and use exclusively OpenAI models on its platform. The information was confirmed by CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad during an onstage interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on October 16, 2026.
The decision marks a significant strategic shift for a company that built much of its narrative around using open-source models and multiple AI providers. Since announcing its partnership with OpenAI in August 2026 — before which there were no clear indications that the relationship with Anthropic would be cut — Replit had operated under the assumption that it could scale with multiple model partners.
Why Replit cut Anthropic
During his presentation at TechCrunch Disrupt, Amjad Masad was direct in explaining the reasoning behind the decision. "I think ChatGPT is better now," he said, citing Replit's internal benchmarks called VBench and a public benchmark published by the company. OpenAI's Sol and Astra models, he said, "consistently perform better at building vibe-coded applications from scratch."
According to Masad, the decision was based on three factors: cost, partnership, and performance. "For all these reasons, we just felt like they were the better partner for now," he added. The CEO also mentioned that the OpenAI partnership would help expand software creation access with GPT-5.6.
The statement was contradicted by people close to the Anthropic-Replit partnership. One source, who requested anonymity, told TechCrunch that the partnership was still in place. Evidence on the company's website, blog posts, and social media showed that Replit was using Anthropic products as recently as a few weeks before the announcement — including a late-September post citing Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 as models running in Replit Agent's production environment. Another Replit employee posted on X about using Anthropic's flagship model Opus 5.5.
Replit as one of Anthropic's top five customers
When asked if losing Replit had contributed to what he described as Anthropic's revenue slowdown, Masad replied that Replit was also one of Anthropic's top five customers. The executive did not share annual recurring revenue (ARR) figures but provided estimates on the company's evolution: in 2025, enterprise represented about 2% of Replit's revenue, while in 2026 it was already 15%. "More than 50% of our revenue is B2B," he said.
The shift comes amid news that Anthropic sought a $2 trillion IPO valuation in October, but investors reduced expectations to $1.5 trillion, with Q3 revenue of $16.8 billion representing 45% sequential growth — a pace that, while solid, was interpreted by the market as a slowdown compared to previous quarters.
Implications for the development ecosystem
Replit's decision has implications that extend beyond the relationship between two companies. Replit has positioned itself as one of the leading AI-assisted development platforms, with millions of developers using its cloud-based environment to create, test, and deploy applications directly from the browser. The platform has become particularly popular among startup founders who use the concept of "vibe coding" — the idea of describing an application in natural language and letting AI build the code.
With the decision to abandon Anthropic, Replit reinforces the trend that major platforms are aligning to a single model provider, which can simplify the user experience but also raises questions about diversity and competition in the AI ecosystem. Reliance on a single model provider creates single points of failure, and market concentration around OpenAI may limit options available to developers and companies seeking alternatives.
Long-term vision: the self-driving company
Beyond the model partnership question, Masad shared his vision for Replit's future in terms of architecture and security. "In the same way that us humans need a certain environment to work — you need a nice office, maybe good food in the office, air-conditioning, computer — agents need a habitat to exist and do good work," he explained. He described that habitat as having "good orchestration, good error recovery, good safety and sandboxing, good networking, good identity and authorization."
The CEO stated there are no immediate plans to raise new funding, that an IPO is "in the future" of the company, and that Replit has rejected acquisition approaches because it is focused on building a long-term company. The company has been operating with gross-margin positive margins, with margins growing alongside enterprise adoption.
The question is whether the decision to bet everything on OpenAI will prove wise in the long run, or if Replit will ultimately face the same competitive pressure that is now pushing Anthropic out. The future of development platforms may depend not just on how good AI models are, but on how resilient the architectures that host them prove to be.
Sources: TechCrunch, Unite.AI, GateNews
✓ Independent sources cross-checked and verified before publishing
