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Replit makes OpenAI the preferred partner for Agent
Replit’s CEO says OpenAI is now the preferred partner behind Replit Agent. Users can still choose Claude, and the claimed split is disputed.
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Replit has a new preferred partner for Agent. It does not, on the record available now, have a settled break with Anthropic.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, CEO and co-founder Amjad Masad said the company was no longer working with Anthropic. He gave three reasons: cost, partnership, and performance. "I think ChatGPT is better now," he said. Replit judges models with an internal benchmark and publishes a public one, he added, and "consistently, Sol and Astra perform better on building vibe-coded applications from scratch." He called it a decision "based on both cost, partnership, and performance," and said they felt like "a better partner for now."
The later account is a default change, not a model removal. After Disrupt, TechCrunch reported, Masad clarified that customers can still access Anthropic models, and that OpenAI's ChatGPT is now the default. Over the weekend he told TechCrunch: "Replit remains model agnostic. Our users can choose Anthropic's Claude or other supported models…OpenAI is now our preferred partner for powering Replit Agent, based on performance, economics, and the strength of our partnership."
On October 17 he posted the same distinction on X. "To clarify: Replit remains model agnostic. Our users can choose Anthropic models as well as many other supported models." What he meant at Disrupt, he wrote, is that OpenAI is "our preferred partner powering Agent based on performance, cost, and strength of our partnership." The captured post runs only through "We believe" and a link, so the rest of that sentence is not in the text available here.
A default is a routing decision. TechCrunch wrote that the shift could significantly reduce Replit's spend with Anthropic, because most customers stick with the default rather than selecting a model themselves. That is an inference about behavior, not a published split of Agent sessions. How often users override the picker is unknown from these accounts.
Earlier context also cuts against a sudden cutoff. TechCrunch noted that Replit announced an OpenAI partnership in August, with no indication then that the Anthropic relationship was ending. Before the OpenAI deal, Replit relied on Claude to run the platform. Masad said onstage that Replit had been, until recently, a top-five customer of Anthropic. TechCrunch reported that partnership was said to have helped revenue grow significantly. It did not give a current spend number.
People familiar with the deal rejected the onstage framing. TechCrunch reported that one person, who asked not to be named, said the partnership was still in place. The same story pointed to recent product evidence: a late-September Replit blog post citing Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 in Agent's production environment, and a product employee's post around then about Anthropic's Opus 5.5. Those mentions show Claude was still being promoted weeks before Disrupt. They do not, by themselves, prove the contract remains in force.
The agreed facts are the narrower ones. OpenAI is the preferred partner powering Replit Agent, and TechCrunch reports ChatGPT is the default. Claude stays selectable. The clarification does not describe Anthropic models as removed. Whether the commercial partnership has ended is disputed, and should not be treated as settled.
TechCrunch first published the story on October 16 and updated it on October 17, including the headline, to add that context.
If Agent is in your workflow, open the model selector and confirm which model the session will run before you assume it is still Claude. Read Masad's October 17 post beside TechCrunch's updated account, and watch for a direct statement from either company on the partnership itself.