Replit CEO Masad Says Company No Longer Works With Anthropic

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Replit CEO Amjad Masad said during an onstage interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 that the company is no longer working with Anthropic, framing the decision around cost, partnership, and performance. The session recording was published by TechCrunch on October 16, 2026.

The exchange began when the interviewer asked whether the OpenAI partnership Replit announced in August 2026 meant the company was no longer working with Anthropic. “Yeah. I mean, yeah,” Masad answered.

Masad said OpenAI’s models now perform better for Replit’s workloads. “I think GPT is better now,” he said, citing an internal Replit benchmark called VBench and a public benchmark the company has published. He said OpenAI’s Sol and Astra models consistently performed better at building vibe-coded applications from scratch, and he described the switch as a decision based on cost, partnership, and performance, with OpenAI the better partner for now.

When the interviewer asked whether losing Replit had contributed to what he described as Anthropic’s reported revenue slowdown, Masad said Replit was also one of Anthropic’s top five customers.

Earlier in the session, asked whether Replit is vulnerable to the same disruption it creates as OpenAI and Anthropic move beyond code generation into building, deploying, and hosting apps, Masad said those offerings remain surface level next to Replit’s full-stack, integrated environment, noting that OpenAI relies on an external service, Cloudflare, for hosting. He said Replit’s agents can spin up databases and key-value stores inside a production environment and that the company can deploy its entire stack into government and enterprise environments as an on-premises solution.