Replit CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said the AI coding company is no longer working with Anthropic, but a person familiar with the relationship told TechCrunch that the partnership remains in place. Neither Replit nor Anthropic has publicly resolved the contradiction.
Masad made the comments onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt on October 16. He said Replit's decision reflected cost, the quality of the partnership and model performance.
“I think ChatGPT is better now,” Masad said. He added that Replit uses an internal benchmark and publishes a public one, and said OpenAI's Sol and Astra models consistently performed better at building “vibe-coded” applications from scratch. He described OpenAI as the better partner “for now.”
Recent records show Anthropic models in use
The dispute is not simply about which model Replit prefers. TechCrunch reported that an unnamed person familiar with the companies' relationship rejected Masad's account and said the partnership had not ended.
Replit's own recent technical writing also shows that Anthropic models were in production shortly before Masad's remarks. In a September 29 engineering post, Replit listed Anthropic's Fable 5 and Fable 5.1 alongside OpenAI's Astra in a table describing one week of Replit Agent production for each model during August and September.
That record establishes recent use, but it does not settle the partnership's status on October 16. A commercial relationship could change after a model was deployed, and the public comments may use “working with” and “partnership” differently. No inspected statement explains the discrepancy.
TechCrunch said it asked Replit for clarification and would update its report if the company responded.
Replit had already expanded its OpenAI ties
Replit announced a new OpenAI-powered product mode in August. The company's Free Mode announcement said the feature used OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna and was designed to let subscribers complete more everyday tasks without consuming credits.
The announcement emphasized capability and cost efficiency, themes Masad returned to at Disrupt. It did not say Replit's Anthropic relationship had ended, however, and Replit's September engineering post later documented production use of models from both providers.
Replit sells a browser-based platform for building and deploying software with AI agents. The company can use multiple model providers across different product modes, so adopting OpenAI technology did not by itself establish that Anthropic had been dropped.
