The AI development platform Replit is shifting its model choice away from Anthropic. CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday, according to TechCrunch, that the company is no longer working with Anthropic. He cited cost, partnership and performance as reasons. Replit had announced a partnership with OpenAI in August.
What is changing
After the event, Masad clarified to TechCrunch that customers can still access Anthropic models on the platform, but OpenAI's ChatGPT is now the default. According to TechCrunch, this could significantly reduce Replit's spending with Anthropic, since most customers stick with the default rather than choosing a model themselves.
Background
Before the OpenAI deal, Replit relied on Anthropic's Claude models to run its platform, according to TechCrunch. Masad said on stage that Replit had until recently been a top-five customer of Anthropic. He told TechCrunch that Replit remains model agnostic and that OpenAI is now the preferred partner for powering Replit Agent.
Insiders who asked not to be named disputed this account, according to TechCrunch, saying the partnership with Anthropic is still in place. Replit's website, blog posts and social media posts showed the company promoting Anthropic products as recently as a few weeks earlier. A late-September blog post cited Claude models running in Replit Agent's production environment.
Growth and enterprise customers
Masad also gave figures on revenue mix without sharing ARR. He said enterprise was about 2% of revenue last year and that about 15% of revenue this year comes from enterprise contracts, with more than 50% from B2B. Backstage, he told TechCrunch he expects more than half of revenue in 2027 to come from enterprise and government customers.
Assessment
Replit justifies the decision with cost, partnership and performance, with the performance claim based on an internal benchmark and a public one. Whether the switch pays off financially cannot be judged from the available information. It remains open whether the insider claim that the Anthropic partnership continues is accurate; if it is, the break is less clear-cut than Masad's account suggests. For companies that source models through platforms, the key point is that the default selection determines which model most users actually use.
Sources
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