Anthropic rolls out a $200-per-month Claude subscription

Anthropic announced on Wednesday that it’s launching a new, very expensive subscription plan for its AI chatbot Claude: Max. An answer to OpenAI’s $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro tier, Max comes with higher usage limits than Anthropic’s $20-per-month Claude Pro subscription as well as priority access to the company’s newest AI models and features.

A bit confusingly, Max comes in two flavors with different price points and usage limits. There’s a $100-per-month Max tier with 5x higher rate limits than Claude Pro and a $200-per-month Max option with 20x higher rate limits.

Frontier AI model developers are looking for new ways to increase revenue — and selling power users an expensive AI subscription seems like a promising way to do it. Just two months after launching ChatGPT Pro, OpenAI reportedly told investors its annualized revenue grew by $300 million. Should Anthropic’s new Max plan be similarly successful, it could give the company a much-needed boost.

Anthropic’s product lead Scott White told TechCrunch in an interview that the company is not ruling out launching even pricier subscriptions someday. Notably, Anthropic still doesn’t have an unlimited usage plan, which OpenAI offers with ChatGPT Pro.

When asked whether Anthropic would ever consider launching a $500-per-month Claude plan, White said, “We’ll always keep a number of exploratory options available to us.” User feedback will continue to guide Anthropic’s product roadmap, he added.

To meet the massive costs of developing frontier AI models, Anthropic is exploring various new revenue channels, one of which is Claude for Education. Claude for Education targets university customers, providing specific capabilities and benefits for colleges.

Anthropic declined to tell TechCrunch how many Claude subscriptions it has sold to date. However, White said the company’s new Claude 3.7 Sonnet AI model has created “a lot of demand” for its products. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is Anthropic’s first reasoning model, a type of model that uses more computing power than traditional models to answer certain questions more reliably.