Replit’s CEO Says It Left Anthropic Five Months After Calling Claude “Undefeated”

Replit CEO Amjad Masad said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt this week that the AI coding platform “is no longer working with Anthropic,” TechCrunch reports. He said the decision came down to several reasons, including cost, and that OpenAI’s models now perform better. One person familiar with the partnership, who asked not to be named, told TechCrunch it is still in place. TechCrunch asked Replit to clarify and had no answer at publication.

Replit sells a browser-based platform where users build and deploy apps, and under the Anthropic partnership it used Claude models to run it.

What Masad said in May

Five months earlier, on a StrictlyVC stage in San Francisco, Masad ranked the labs for TechCrunch. “Anthropic is still undefeated on the core agentic loop,” he said, meaning the cycle where an AI agent plans, calls tools and checks its own work. “They have the best tool calling; the agent can stay coherent much longer. GPT-5 is catching up quickly.” He added: “We use all three,” counting Google alongside Anthropic and OpenAI.

In the same interview he made the money case for staying independent. “We’ve been gross margin positive for over a year,” he said. Gross margin is what’s left of revenue after the direct cost of serving customers, and for an AI coding app the biggest piece of that cost is the bill from the model provider, the lab whose model runs underneath.

The cost line that moves

That bill has swung Replit’s numbers before. The Information reported in August 2025 that Replit’s gross margins ranged from 36% to negative 14% as usage of its agent grew.

Rivals have hit the same wall. In August 2025, a person close to Windsurf told TechCrunch its gross margins were “very negative,” meaning the product cost more to run than the company could charge. Cursor’s maker, Anysphere, changed its pricing that summer to pass along the higher cost of running Anthropic’s newest Claude model to its most active users, and CEO Michael Truell apologized for unclear communication about the change, TechCrunch reported. In May, Masad cited reporting that put Cursor at negative 23% gross margins.

Where Replit’s revenue is shifting

Masad also said this week that enterprise contracts were “like 2%” of revenue last year and “like 15%” this year, and that “more than 50% of our revenue is B2B,” sales to businesses. He said Replit is “not sharing ARR numbers just yet,” meaning annual recurring revenue.

Sources

• TechCrunch: Replit is no longer working with Anthropic, CEO says (Oct. 16, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Replit’s Amjad Masad on the Cursor deal, fighting Apple, and why he’d rather not sell (May 1, 2026)
• TechCrunch: High costs and thin margins threatening AI coding startups (Aug. 7, 2025)
• The Information: Replit’s Margins Illustrate the High Costs of Coding Agents (Aug. 2025; paywalled)