Replit's CEO has told a conference audience that his company is done with Anthropic. Someone familiar with the relationship says it isn't. Both claims are now in circulation, and only one of them was said onstage with a microphone.
Amjad Masad, Replit's CEO and co-founder, made the remark on Thursday at the Disrupt conference. Replit, the browser-based platform where people build and deploy apps, had been running its product on Anthropic's Claude models. Masad's account is that this arrangement is over.
What Masad actually said
Masad gave three reasons: cost, partnership and performance. He did not pick one and leave the others as garnish. "I think ChatGPT is better now," he said, and he added that Replit measures performance with an internal benchmark.
There is also a public benchmark, he said, and on it two models called Sol and Astra "consistently" do better at building vibe-coded applications from scratch. The report doesn't say who makes those models or give any scores. So the claim is a specific one, but we can't check it from what was said.
His summary was that, for all those reasons, the other side was "a better partner for now." That "for now" is doing honest work. In this industry, loyalty comes with a renewal date.
The timeline is a little awkward
Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August. At that point nothing suggested it had parted ways with Anthropic. Nobody said it was still with Anthropic either, but the absence of a breakup announcement is not the same as a breakup that hasn't happened.
Then there's September. A Replit blog post from that month names Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 as models running in the production environment of Replit Agent. So if the split is real, it is recent, or at least it came after the company was still publicly crediting Claude models.
The Anthropic relationship was also reported to have helped Replit grow its revenue significantly. That makes the breakup, if it is one, a notable thing to announce at a conference. It is also an odd way to find out.
The pushback
Not everyone agrees with Masad's version. One person familiar with the Anthropic and Replit partnership, who asked not to be named, said it was still in place.
That is one anonymous voice against the CEO, so it deserves the appropriate weight, which is not much, and also not zero. There are ways both statements could be true. The two companies might still have a contract while Replit shifts its product toward other models. "Working with" can mean a signed agreement, a default model, or a line item on an invoice. The report doesn't say which Masad meant, and Replit hadn't answered a request for clarification at the time of writing. The original report said it would update if the company responded.
The business behind the drama
Masad also gave a rare look at Replit's revenue mix, though he declined to share annual recurring revenue figures.
- Enterprise share: about 2% of revenue last year, and about 15% this year, by his estimate.
- B2B share: more than 50% of revenue.
That is a big move in a year. It also helps explain why cost and partnerships feature so heavily in the model decision. A company selling to enterprises cares about margins, vendor terms and reliability in a way a hobbyist platform can get away with ignoring.
Agents need a habitat
Masad also talked about safety, using an analogy. People need a decent environment to do good work, he said, such as an office, food, air-conditioning and a computer. Agents need the equivalent.
In his telling, that habitat includes good orchestration, error recovery, safety and security, sandboxing, networking, and identity and authorization. Get all that right, he said, and you can deploy AI safely.
It is a tidy argument, and also a convenient one for a company that sells exactly that kind of environment.
What we know and what we don't
| Question | Status |
|---|---|
| Did Masad say Replit no longer works with Anthropic? | Yes, onstage |
| Why? | Cost, partnership and performance, per Masad |
| Is there independent proof of the benchmark claim? | Not in this report |
| Does Anthropic or Replit confirm the split? | No confirmation in the report |
| Is the partnership still active? | Disputed by an anonymous source |
The kicker
In AI, model providers are less like spouses and more like cloud vendors with better marketing. They get swapped when the numbers change. What remains unclear is whether Replit has already swapped, or whether its CEO said the quiet part before the paperwork caught up.