Replit makes ChatGPT its default model

Masad made his remarks onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Thursday.[1] He later clarified that OpenAI’s ChatGPT had become Replit’s default model.[1] Replit announced a partnership with OpenAI in August, and Masad said OpenAI is now its preferred partner for powering Replit Agent.[1] He cited performance, economics and the strength of the partnership as reasons for that preference.[1] For teams using Replit, the key operational change is which model is selected by default, rather than the removal of all other supported options.[1]

Masad said Replit’s decision was based on cost, partnership and performance, and said he thinks ChatGPT is now better.[1] He also said Replit uses an internal benchmark to assess measures including performance.[1] Replit’s public benchmark consistently showed Sol and Astra performing better at building vibe-coded applications from scratch.[1] Those details offer some context for the decision, but the evidence does not establish that the public benchmark alone drove the choice or that it evaluated every relevant task.[1]

Customers can still access Anthropic models on Replit and choose Claude or other supported models.[1] That means the default change does not, by itself, prevent a user from selecting an Anthropic model.[1] The partnership’s status is less straightforward: Masad said Replit was no longer working with Anthropic, but an unnamed person familiar with the partnership told TechCrunch that it was still in place.[1] Replit had previously relied on Claude models to run its platform, and a late-September Replit blog post named Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 as models running in Replit Agent’s production environment.[1]

TechCrunch reported that the default change could significantly reduce Replit’s spending with Anthropic because most customers keep the default model.[1] The change follows a period when Replit had been one of Anthropic’s top-five customers, according to TechCrunch.[1] TechCrunch also reported that the Anthropic partnership was said to have helped Replit grow revenue significantly.[1] Masad said enterprise contracts accounted for 15% of Replit’s revenue this year, compared with about 2% last year, and that more than half of revenue came from business-to-business sales.[1]