Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, CEO says
Quick Answer
Replit has ended its partnership with Anthropic, citing cost and performance reasons, and now favors OpenAI's models, which reportedly perform better in building applications.
Quick Take
Despite this, some insiders claim the partnership with Anthropic is still active, as recent evidence suggests Replit was still using Anthropic's Claude models as of September.
Key Points
- Replit's CEO Amjad Masad announced the split from Anthropic at TechCrunch Disrupt.
- The decision was influenced by cost, performance, and partnership evaluations.
- Replit's revenue from enterprise contracts has increased from 2% to 15% this year.
- Masad emphasized the importance of AI safety measures for effective deployment.
- Recent evidence indicates Replit used Anthropic's Claude models as late as September.
DeepSignal Analysis
What happened
Replit has officially ended its partnership with Anthropic, as stated by CEO Amjad Masad. The decision was influenced by factors such as cost and performance, with Replit now favoring OpenAI's models. However, some insiders suggest that the partnership with Anthropic may still be active, as evidence indicates that Replit was using Anthropic's Claude models as recently as September.
Key evidence
- Replit's CEO Amjad Masad announced the termination of the partnership with Anthropic, citing cost and performance as key reasons.
- Replit began a partnership with OpenAI in August, indicating a shift in preference towards OpenAI's models over Anthropic's.
- A September blog post mentioned that Replit was still utilizing Anthropic's Claude models in its production environment.
Why it matters
The shift from Anthropic to OpenAI could impact Replit's development capabilities and revenue model, as performance metrics are crucial for application building. Additionally, the conflicting reports about the partnership's status raise questions about transparency and the dynamics of AI partnerships in the tech industry. As enterprise revenue grows for Replit, the choice of AI partner may influence its competitive edge in the market.
📖 Reader Mode
~3 min readReplit, the AI coding platform that has become a favorite of startup founders and developers, is no longer working with Anthropic, the company’s CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said Thursday while onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Masad said the decision was made for a number of different reasons, including cost. Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, but there was never any indication that it was no longer with Anthropic.
“I think ChatGPT is better now,” Masad said, adding that the company uses an internal benchmark to help assess metrics like performance. “We publish a public benchmark as well, and consistently, Sol and Astra perform better on building vibe-coded applications from scratch. It was a decision based on both cost, partnership, and performance. And for all these reasons, we just felt like they were a better partner for now.”
Replit sells a cloud-based software development platform where users can develop and deploy apps directly from inside their browser. Under its partnership with Anthropic, Replit used the AI lab’s Claude models to run its platform. That partnership was said to have helped the company grow its revenue significantly.
Masad’s comments were met with some pushback from insiders familiar with the partnership between the Anthropic and Replit, however. One person familiar, who asked not to be named, said the partnership was still in place.
There is some evidence that Replit was using Anthropic products as recently as September. For instance, a blog post in September cites Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 as models running in Replit Agent’s production environment.
TechCrunch reached back out to Replit for clarification and will update this story if we hear back.
Masad shared insights about the company’s growth while onstage at Disrupt, noting that enterprise is starting to provide a larger slice of revenue.
“We’re not sharing ARR numbers just yet, but in terms of growth, like, I would say, enterprise was like 2% of revenue last year,” Masad said. “This year, I would say like 15% of our revenue is enterprise contracts, and more than 50% of our revenue is B2B.”
Masad also commented on the necessity for good AI safety measures.
“In the same way that us humans need a certain environment to work — you need a nice office, maybe nice good food in the office, air-conditioning, computer — agents need a habitat for them to exist and do good work,” he said. “So that habitat has good orchestration, good error recovery, good safety and security and sandboxing, good networking, good identity and authorization. And once you figure all of that out, then you can deploy AI safely.”
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Lucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo. You can contact Lucas by emailing [email protected].
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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