Replit is making OpenAI its default model partner for its agent, chief executive Amjad Masad said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday, in comments reported by TechCrunch on October 17, 2026. Masad said the company is “no longer working with Anthropic”, citing cost, performance and partnership.
The statement was clarified after Disrupt and over the weekend, when Masad told TechCrunch that Replit remains model agnostic and that users can still choose Claude. OpenAI, he said, is now the preferred partner for powering the agent, based on performance, economics and the strength of the partnership.
Benchmarks, Cost And The August OpenAI Partnership
Masad argued the switch is performance-led, saying “I think ChatGPT is better now” and pointing to internal and public benchmarks. In those tests, he said, OpenAI’s Sol and Astra models consistently performed better at building vibe-coded applications from scratch.
Replit announced its OpenAI partnership in August, but gave no indication at the time that Anthropic was being dropped. The Disrupt remarks therefore landed as a surprise, because they described an ending rather than an addition, as our overview of AI coding tools explained shows is a fast-moving set of alliances.
Claude Stays On The Menu, And The Framing Is Disputed
Despite the onstage wording, Claude has not been removed from the platform, and users can still select it or other supported models. Replit’s October 16 changelog even added Claude Haiku 5.5 to the Power Mode model selector for Core and Pro plans, according to WebProNews.
People familiar with the Anthropic-Replit relationship disputed the onstage framing and said the partnership is still in place. That leaves two different descriptions in public: a default that has clearly changed, and a wider partnership whose status the two sides characterise differently.
For developers weighing the options day to day, our comparison of Claude Code, Cursor and Copilot covers how model choice plays out inside competing coding environments. Replit’s position is that the choice remains available, even as the default moves.
Why The Default Slot Carries The Usage
The mechanism behind the story is simple: most customers stick with the default rather than changing model settings. Whoever holds the default slot therefore receives most of the usage, and most of the spend that follows from it.
Before the OpenAI deal, Replit relied on Claude to run its platform and was a top-five Anthropic customer, and the Claude partnership helped drive significant revenue growth for the company. Losing the default position is consequently a much larger commercial change than losing a place in a model menu, which Replit has not done.
The shift also reflects how vibe coding workloads are judged: building a working application from a prompt, end to end, rather than completing isolated code snippets. Masad’s benchmark claim is specifically about that from-scratch building task.
That is why preferred partner language matters more than menu placement in announcements like this. A model can remain listed, fully supported and regularly updated, yet still lose the bulk of platform traffic the moment another model becomes the preselected option for new sessions.
Why It Matters
The central entity is the default model slot in Replit Agent, and its attributes are the benchmark performance, cost and partnership terms that decide which provider fills it. Its neighbours are the selectable alternatives that remain in Power Mode, the agent product built on top of the slot, and the rival labs competing to be the preselected option on other platforms.
Defaults decide markets quietly, because most users never change them. A platform of Replit’s size moving its default from one lab to another redirects real usage and revenue, even when every previous option stays available in the settings.
Background
Replit built its agent business on Anthropic’s Claude models, growing into one of Anthropic’s top five customers as agent-built applications drove its revenue growth, before signing a partnership with OpenAI in August 2026 that set up this week’s change of default.
Source: TechCrunch and WebProNews
0 Comments