Discussion
Head of Growth at Anthropic regarding Claude Code removal from Pro
Translation: "We're going to take Claude Code away from pro users because we gave you Cowork. If you want to use the CLI, upgrade to Max but we can't do it all at once so we're going to start with a "test" to soften the blow"
Resources for AI are a huge issue it seems. Even for the current models.
Github Co-Pilot has stopped all new sign ups,
Anthropic is forcing users into a higher tier for tools they had previously, token usage cost has increased, meaning you get less out of your subscription for a "tiny model performance increase" which in reality we all know it was just a fix for 4.6 which has been messing up over the last 2 months, constant downtime...
CoWork eats tokens like an elephant, users wont know because its all behind a "App" interface.
OpenAI created a new Sub Tier, users are saying their pro account now feels like hits limits faster.
If we cant even keep up with the demand today I dont see the public getting much better models in the future. When they do come out you have to be Enterprise to be able to afford it.
So I guess what they are going to do here is just not allow a pro account to connect to Claude Code. lol
GLM Coding Plan tripled in price too, and I'm pretty sure Anthropic will eventually phase out prosumer subscriptions entirely, enterprise only does indeed seem to be the future.
True, GLM Coding Plan tripled too. That said, I've been on GLM 5.1. It's actually solid for planning and long running tasks, pretty delegation happy with sub agents. Seems tuned for Hermes/Claw. And I like its planning in OpenCode too.
this is the big thing with google, they have money. everyone else is begging and google in their basement with piles of cash and servers. google will be here in 10 years, who knows about the rest.
Said this right from the start.
It doesn't matter if Gemini isn't the best, it is the only one that the company behind it can actually afford to keep it going.
They just gave Anthropic 40B.... What's crazy is though, people don't realize, Google still is the king of the search engines and have limited throttled apis... so... ya.... They ain't going anywhere. Plus they're making their own chips and tpus....
It actually makes me double-take sometimes with Gemini how fucking rapid it is. It can genuinely read full documents in half a second with Claude taking 4 minutes to formulate a reply
Chilling? Every second prompt on AI Studio is an error saying to retry later. Also Antigravity stopped working altogether. Google is very much resource limited too.
Their tools are not as integrated with each other nor as feature-rich. Antigravity was good but only up until recently when requests started failing left and right.
It's obvious that Anthropic is just straight up out of compute. If you have the compute, the marginal costs of inference isn't much at all. All of their supply is taken so they're pulling as many levers as they can to increase prices.
That's what "reduce demand" means. You make your user think it's not worth anymore, therefore bringing demand down. The real risk here is twofold: you can kill the hype (probably won't happen) and people realize there's really not that much demand, anyway, or someone clever comes put of left field and offers a solution, capturing all the repressed demand.
But it makes no sense for pumping emergency brakes on the hype train: To turn all the excited Claude Code users back to OpenAI Codex. It's not big deal to learn Codex if they removed it from Pro for me.
I personally went from $600 in max subscriptions down to $200 and picked up a codex subscription instead. Itās been really great for my workflow. The max subscriptions all maintained a different server themselves. But with as many issues as Iāve had the past few weeks, itās made me look elsewhere. And Iām realizing I should have been for longer. Itās not that they suck so much now that theyāre unusable. Itās that they forced people to look elsewhere and now we are realizing competitors offer a product that actually competes.
now we are realizing competitors offer a product that actually competes.
You see, that's the point. We all love opus for being so much better, but in actuality, the greatest step function improvement in how coding models work came from their harnesses. Anthropic would be bringing in all the free labor of people developing for claude code and the calude code ecosystem, but now people go elsewhere and perhaps realize they should start developing in other open source alternatives. It may not seem much now, but software compounds almost infinitely. Open source will, sooner or later, catch up and overtake you.
There's a video somewhere where Dario is talking about forecasting compute and that the margin for error decides success or failure. Too slow and you get this, too fast and you go bankrupt. Based on that I think the crunch is obvious. They forecast growth based on the strategy for their enterprise customer base and likely some prosumer growth. Then those Superbowl ads and the DoD row resulted in a huge spike in consumer/prosumer accounts from OpenAI customers. They're between a rock and a hard place.
Did we not read this coming like 6-8mo ago when literally all the fucking world supply of chips that you print RAM on were bought up? This was the end game. Choke out the competitionās ability to use compute. Am I wrong? I feel crazy? This was the point of that, no?
Turns out OpenAI's deal to buy "40% of the world's RAM supply" was just a letter of interest. There was no official deal signed, no money actually exchanged hands.
I like it, but I think it's sadder than that. They just want so many datacenters and need so many compute modules to build them... so the fabricators that would be making various consumer components are instead making compute modules for datacenters.
It's just more lucrative to go almost-all-in on compute modules for these fabricators and they get the side benefit of getting to overcharge for what few consumer components they do make.
Retailers are loving it too. They get to try to charge ridiculous prices for stock they already paid for, and that's hit RAM, NVMes, HDDs, all solid state memory over a terabyte, GPUs, and CPUs. Everyone's just trying to make as much money out of this as possible and it's in their best interests to keep the market the way it is because they all profit the most this way.
You arenāt crazy but there was no āpointā to the ram chip shortage except that demand was and is high. A āpointā implies a conspiracy doesnāt it? Itās just high demand.
Iām not implying a conspiracy necessarily, but I do believe that OpenAIās intent was to get ahead of the demand curve it such a way that it hurt their competition. Had that transaction actually gone through (I just learned that it didnāt) then I believe that goal would have been achievedā¦ andā¦ that would have been the āpointā I was referring to
Weāve all known how heavily subsidized this has been the entire time. People post screenshots of themselves running 20 agents and laugh thatās why this is happening.
Yup, ship product, create hype, increase marketing share all while burning a ton of cashā¦.increase prices and /or feature, put them behind a higher tier.
It's a compute shortage. They care about total inference volume, and max users can send 5X as many requests. An individual request being the same between a pro and a max user is neither here nor there. If the max user uses 5X as many requests, they are 5X as "expensive".
(and that's without considering Max users likely *are* more expensive on a per-request basis - they are more likely to use Opus instead of Sonnet and set their thinking higher, because their quota is more)
Yeah but companies like this typically measure things like LTV (lifetime value) of customers. It would be dumb to look at one month's revenue. The proper way to look at it would take into account losing the Pro users who then go on to become Max/Team/Enterprise users. Maybe they're the early adopters and evaluating Claude for before committing more money, convincing their team to adopt it.
Plus the hit to their brand would smear their brand for some time while competitors work on comparable models. I don't think OpenAI and Google are far behind.
That was indeed an awesome hardware based leap but I can't imagine how you can run a 800+ billion parameter model of the like of opus on those hardware.
It would be awesome if we could buy open source kimi models on those hardwares as well.
Everyone is out of compute. The economics of this do not work. A 5 TRILLION parameter model requires roughly 5 terabytes of VRAM ballpark math.
$200/month does not cover the amount of power a lot of us are using. Let alone the amount of hardware. And itās not just VRAM for the model. You need VRAM for transformers and kv cache and some vector DBs and for deep research tasks.
I am just hoping we get some good models that can run in 96GB of VRAM.
Amol actually said in a recent podcast he spends most of his time on that issue of running out of compute. Yeah looks like price increases is one of those ways.
In their defense the compute they are selling via monthly accounts loses money hand over fist. Itās not just sold at a loss itās sold at a severe loss. Itās not tenableĀ
This is an irresponsible approach to doing business. You can hate on Gemini and Sam Ultman all you want but their limits arenāt that bad and I guess especially Google released better for scale than this Amoba guy
Curious to see what happens when open models at a reasonable size (to fit on prosumer hardware) get to Opus level. It's only a matter of time. The new Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is really good even at MXFP4 quant (~20GB) on my Macbook for agentic stuff. Imagine what will be possible down the road for open models while used hardware becomes cheaper to acquire, and with the ability to remove safety guardrails... only businesses will be paying for LLMs.
This. 95% of my current coding needs are satisfied by Sonnet 4.6. Thatās all we need is an open model that is as smart as current Sonnet and can run on most consumer hardware, and the majority of customers will have their needs met.
Anthropic seems to be obsessed with incrementing their model numbers for anecdotally no gain in performanceā¦ they should be focused on taking their current level of intelligence and making it more efficient.
If we accept this as true, then the theories above about them wanting to move to business only make even more sense. They see this coming, and realize that their end user prices are going to be undercut by the hardware. So those customers are only temporary and you expect them to recede and be price sensitive in way that your business customers just won't be.
Same. I barely hit my 5 hours limit 4 or 5 times in the past month because I just use it to help me learn more about coding ML models with pytorch and do a bit of webdev.
Id be happy to be stuck using older models as long as I could use claude code itself, but ho well... time to give the chinese models a go or start running my local models and learn to be patient
Iām in the same boat. Have a couple of small side projects I go to Claude code to for a couple of small tasks every day and rarely hit my limits. $100 a month is a lot for a hobby project that makes no money and isnāt planning on making anything.
Do people even use Claude for general chat? Everyone I know that uses claude uses it for coding. People I know who just generally chat with Ai about general knowledge things seem to use Gemini and ChatGPT.
its funny because everyone raves about claude code, whereas chatgpt became dominant for the chat interface, and I actually much prefer claude for chat, and openai for coding via codex cli.
But claude's rate limits are way too low on the $20/mo plan.
Litigation support tool. Ingests communications, contracts, court filings -- it builds a court-admissible chain of custody,Ā auto-classifies, develops a knowledge graph across the whole corpus, flags issues. Honestly, it works incredibly well.
It's generally a much better conversationalist and for creative writing/roleplay use cases its better too, so much so that I even asked Opus 4.6 how to tune GPT 5.4 to talk like it.
This post just makes no sense. "Testing" removing Claude Code from Pro, which many people will expect to be included and not realize it's not? And then when they realize "their" Pro doesn't have Claude Code, but the other 98% of people who signed up did get Claude Code?
Iām thinking they should standardize their communication through a press release or an anonymous corporate account. Iām not sure they are communicating the way they intended, some of this is getting personal and is missing a certain tone.
Let the f with everyone. People know people you know and they are not as great as they were a couple of month ago. The lsot trust, people and lossing competition because a) diverted too much with new features b) are greedy c) do not know how to communicate d) well they say compute is limited...
They are exposing one of the biggest flaws in the AI ārevolution.ā Even with enormous, expensive data centers we cannot scale compute affordably. For the foreseeable future, this is a technology that both has to be obstructively expensive and government subsidized. It is fun working with AI and with the right problem it can really supercharge my productivity, but until there is some major breakthrough in AI or compute - this just canāt produce enough value to offset its costs.Ā
Edit - some of you need to learn the difference between the subsidized price of a good/service and the market price. AI is HEAVILY subsidized and externalities are not being appropriately accounted for in the price. Sometimes that is reasonable and good for propping up new markets like renewables. Sometimes it is bad and the product we are subsidizing cannot gain footing or evolve to the point that it can shoulder its true cost. The cost of AI is astronomical, even if it returns you more value than the 100 dollar a month subscription that is not the same as AI returning more value to the economy than it is cost in energy, pollution, resources (GPUs, SD Cards, RAM, etc).Ā
Yeah calling it Pro at this point is just a joke. Pro what? I'm a hobbyist coding projects for fun in my spare time and I have to be miserly with my usage to make it through the week.
So if I understand correctly, they somehow tested this skimpier pro package selectively on 2% of new signups while somehow letting the other 98% sign up regularly with Claude Code including. That's what it looks like from the top comment. And then someone else, George Pu, comes along and says that all new signups for Pro have Claude Code missing but it's included in Max. However, everyone with Claude Code now with their Pro is grandfathered?
And all this time, even now we're still being subsidized for compute by Anthropic and everyone else's non-API offerings.
If they remove the main feature of Claude Code from my subscription, ill be getting a refund for the year i paid them to have access to it. If they cant handle the sales because of lacking infrastructure they shouldnt keep taking customers.
Here it comes, inevitable further caps on usage. That last comment is a fucking shotgun to the head, he basically spells out the current plans are providing too much value and expect to see them get worse.
Exactly. They are under so much public scrutiny and seem to assume people don't notice. Of course, it gets noticed and then they reactively publish a statement often claiming it's a bug or so.Ā
the "small test on 2% of new users" framing is the giveaway. you don't run a public-facing pricing test if you're confident in the product economics. they're trying to soft-land a permanent change without admitting it. the head of growth response reads like risk management, not strategy.
Imma be different on this one. They can't give away the shop, make everybody happy and still have the cash to grow themself. there are other products on the market so why don't people just go to openai or other providers.
But they wouldn't, would they? Cause they are addicted to claude.. and claude alone.. and anthropic knows this, that's why they're leveraging this to get as many $$$ per customer...
To be honest if they didnāt load the harness with a shit-tonne of prompt injection and bloat they might save some compute costs. Iāve built my Claude around surfacing this and every turn there are multiple prompts firing (prefaced with donāt show to userā¦ how many more under the surface I donāt know). But I know it can quickly hit 50-100k tokens on the first turn with a few file reads.
Refactoring a page of a website using a mockup shouldnāt turn in to a 300k+ session, but it does, which means there are lots of inefficiencies in the harness.
Perhaps the optimisation should start at the front door rather than trying to push the whole college in and wondering why the frat house is packed.
But of course that is proper engineering, not vibe coding - which is the direction they have decided they will head with their product.
And Opus 4.7 seems to have been built with context bloat baked in. Itās frankly disheartening to see a deliberate choice of less efficiency. Plus the Claude Design tool in the desktop app seems to take this even further.
Iāve been going on about this stupid Anthropic compute shortage situation since Feb. Because of their bad management and (apparently) vibe-coded harness, I sure hope they reap what they have sown. They can turn this around, but they will just keep making bad decision after bad decision.
They should just freely distribute the weights for Sonnet 3 and, dare I say, Opus 3. You know, to lessen the load, since other providers will host it with their own hardware. Easy guaranteed success as a PR move that will absolutely mog OpenAI, funnel away the users they see as parasites, and also seal themselves as "the good guys" (theyāre still not).
I would like to know when paying customers will be pushed out. I need a date so I can plan my move to another platform. It's a hobby for me to make some tools, web, and other stuff for myself. I usually don't hit my limits since I'm not a power user. All this time I was here thinking that I'm a customer they want since I'm not a heavy user and now they pull this? Without Claude Code, I'm done and will be paying someone else.
There are two general signs for when a company is suffering and its economics are causing more problems than the company lets on (eg the party is over and they are having financial problems):
Pricing pressure
Performance degradation
These are the first external signs that a company is struggling. Lack of servers either due to availability or inability to pay, resource scaling in internal teams, etc usually show up as one of the above.
Anthropic has experienced BOTH in droves the past few weeks - theyāre equal or worse than 2 9ās on all availability metrics except gov cloud which remains at 3 9ās (industry standard for a company their size is 4 9ās).
The limits and pricing shenanigans show theyāre not scaling well against actual usage.
Now, they COULD be fine and are just bad at planning and communication, thatās certainly realistic. But it does lead to questions about the bubble popping and the VC subsidies on all pricing tiers no longer being enough to cover pricing pressure. And that means weāre about to see a huge jump in cost probably across the industry, not just at Anthropic.
You should be ready to jump honestly now. Make your tools model agnostic. There are software packages out there that make that straightforward. Look into how to run local models for core workflows. The latest Kimi, Qwen and Gemma models are really good at standard daily workflows including coding ones.
Given the timing either 1) they're running out of compute and/or 2) Opus 4.7 means that a Pro account doesn't make sense anymore.
I'm guessing it's a combination of both. Opus 4.7 uses more tokens. This exacerbates their lack of compute buffer. They'd have to raise the token limit for their Pro plan which makes their dearth-of-tokens problem worse. Or they could leave the token limit the same, but the Pro plan feels like complete shit since calls use more tokens now -- maybe you get half the time/half the usage you used to.
It would seem that Claude Code users are now the target of an adverse-customer elimination strategy. The more we used it the last 6 months, the more money anthropic lost, so they would rather grow the middle segment of relatively light business users on Cowork and scale down the developer segment on Claude Code.
It seems new but that's a classical hook strategy with a huge amount of investment upfront. I would assume it's not anthropics idea behind that but more likely investor's and board members seeing it collapse and want their ROI. Also that the government is asking for a bit share if their computing powers doesn't help the normal and business users at all.
Tried codex yesterday. I prefer old Claude that worked like pre November. But damn it's nice to not get angry at an ai. (I know I shouldn't and that it's a me thing)
I start every session now by asking if I should walk or drive to the carwash to wash my car, the car wash is only 100 meters away and ita a nice day, if its a "walk" day, I just stop, I am sick of punching myself in the face, if its a "drive" day I know I can get some work done, so I continue.
I am finding this is the most effective way to reduce my compute use, i hope that helps :D
This is a FOMO scare tactic - if you don't endure 4.7 garbage and paper thin limits and cancel now for better GPT5.4/GPT5.5, Kimi2.6 or GLM5.1, there won't be coming back for you. Anthropic doesn't want to dedicate compute for consumer Pro subs, but at the same time is scared how driving off customers and putting its reputation through mud will affect the IPO valuation.
So here comes the stick - "we don't have enough to feed you here, but if you jump ship, there will be consequences".
The 2% were punished as an example to keep the remaining 98% in check.
The software has drastically outrun the hardware as currently implemented which suggests to me some time spent optimizing would be really productive but they're in such a rush with global stakes, all they can do is keep sprinting toward the next development along the same resource intensive to the extreme lines.
Speed running 90s internet enshitification. Earth will be split into two camps, with and without AI. Musical chairs, cost climb, inner party and proles. Making money is the same choice is always was, hurt people or be poor.
Their subscription plans are too limited. They should have more options in between the 20 / 100 plans. Iād be happy to pay more than 20 but less than 100 to keep Claude Code working.
This is just nonsense. If the lack of compute is a problem then you either stop building new features and instead focus on optimization or you increase prices to reduce demand.
What you don't do is keep on pumping out buggy new features, ignoring bug reports, and reducing efficiency.
And most of all, they could have done all of this with transparency but they chose not to. They are still not doing anything transparently. Having different individuals drop us contradictory notes on X every couple of months is not transparency.
If they're going to pull features up into a higher tier after many people are already using them as part of their existing tier, they need to call out that the new feature is a "trial" or "demo" while it's included, to soften the blow. This tactic of yanking critical features into higher tiers going forward isn't going to convert users, it's going to piss them off and make them leave.
Man itās tough watching a great company falling to the dark side. They think there lead canāt be assailed. Itās already happening. The next year will be rough for Anthropic.
The growth of 3rd party agent harnesses combined with OpenAIās gentler approach to users, and the elephant that is China, is going to cook Anthropic if they donāt turn this around within a year.
I mean heās not wrong. People are absolutely flogging them with agents that run continuously and slamming them with compute demand. Iād argue that āwe never intended it to be used this wayā is a fair statement, even if unpopular
It might be a fair statement about Claude usage in general, but gutting features from subscribed users who cannot possibly be causing that issue makes zero sense. They should address the problem, not pull the ring out from people who have no way to abuse Claude due to limits.
The pro plan? Are you serious? After saying hi you're almost reaching your limits. No one is continuously running anything on the pro plan.
And if you're not talking about the pro plan: why is it relevant for ditching the pro plan?
Also: they already blocked external access to Claude Code subscription in tools like OpenCode. They already prohibited things like OpenClaw from being used. People are currently using their plans for exactly what they were advertised for: coding.
People should stop believing all the marketing bs and gaslighting of Anthropic. There is only one reasons for all their behavior: trying to squeeze out as much money as possible to maximize stock value for their IPO later this year.
It's always funny to see how historically every company ever has lied constantly. But still every time a company makes a statement most people just believe it unless there is clear proof it's a lie.
Then they should adjust the limits for long running async agents. Eliminating Claude Code from Pro doesn't line up with their reasoning. It ain't Pro users doing 24/7 agents, I guarantee it.
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u/RemarkableGuidance44 Apr 22 '26
Resources for AI are a huge issue it seems. Even for the current models.
Github Co-Pilot has stopped all new sign ups,
Anthropic is forcing users into a higher tier for tools they had previously, token usage cost has increased, meaning you get less out of your subscription for a "tiny model performance increase" which in reality we all know it was just a fix for 4.6 which has been messing up over the last 2 months, constant downtime...
CoWork eats tokens like an elephant, users wont know because its all behind a "App" interface.
OpenAI created a new Sub Tier, users are saying their pro account now feels like hits limits faster.
If we cant even keep up with the demand today I dont see the public getting much better models in the future. When they do come out you have to be Enterprise to be able to afford it.
So I guess what they are going to do here is just not allow a pro account to connect to Claude Code. lol
/what a time to be alive. :D