Anthropic just yanked its Claude Code feature from the Pro subscription tier without a peep—no announcement, just a quiet update to the pricing page. New Pro users who want the coding assistant now have to upgrade to the $100-per-month Max plan.
Anthropic's head of growth, Amol Avasare, later clarified on X that this is a small-scale test affecting only about 2% of new Pro sign-ups. Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren't impacted.
https://twitter.com/sama/status/2046752492093165708
Avasare explained that when Max launched a year ago, it wasn't designed with Claude Code, Cowork, or long-running agents in mind—it was built for heavy chat. After Claude Code was bundled into Max and usage exploded following the Opus 4 release, long-running asynchronous agents became part of daily workflows. Per-user consumption shot up, and the current subscription wasn't priced for that kind of load. Anthropic has already added weekly caps and peak-time throttles, and the company is still testing different approaches and gathering feedback. He promised that if any final changes affect current subscribers, they'll be notified well in advance. "The message will come from us," he wrote, "not from screenshots on X or Reddit."
OpenAI's Codex lead, Thibault Sottiaux, quickly fired back on X: Codex will remain available in both the Free and Plus ($20/month) tiers. OpenAI has the compute and efficient models to support it, he said, and any major changes will be communicated early to the community. "Transparency and trust are two principles we won't break," Sottiaux stated, "even if it means leaving some short-term revenue on the table." Sam Altman retweeted the post with a simple caption: "We want you to have a lot of AI."