Anthropic: Claude Code Briefly Removed from Pro Plan

Anthropic and the Temporary Withdrawal of Claude Code

Anthropic recently made a controversial decision to temporarily withdraw the coding tool Claude Code from its $20 Pro subscription offering for certain new customers. This decision was quickly reversed after facing public backlash. The company described this initiative as a small test, but an executive acknowledged that the current plans no longer met the intensive computing demands of these tools.

This episode highlights a broader issue affecting the entire tech industry: a shortage of computing capacity. Major players like OpenAI and GitHub have also begun to restrict their services or suspend new sign-ups to preserve their resources.

Anthropic's Adjustments and Reactions

Anthropic's decision to remove Claude Code from the Pro plan was followed by a swift retraction after a wave of negative reactions. Amol Avasare, head of growth at Anthropic, explained that the current subscription plans no longer matched how users were utilizing Claude. According to Ed Zitron, who tracked the situation on Where's Your Ed At, Claude Code temporarily disappeared from the pricing tables on Anthropic's website. However, existing Pro users were still able to access Claude Code via the command-line interface and the web app.

After these changes were discussed on X, Amol Avasare clarified that it was a "small test" affecting about 2% of new prosumer sign-ups, and that existing Pro and Max subscribers were not impacted. Zitron noted, however, that this explanation did not align with the visible changes on the site, where the Pro plan appeared without access to Claude Code. Anthropic subsequently reversed these changes, and Avasare apologized for the confusion caused.

The Limits of Max Plans and Evolving Usage

Beyond the incident, Avasare's comments on the future of Anthropic's offerings are revealing. He admitted that the company had made "small adjustments along the way," such as imposing weekly caps and stricter limits during peak hours. However, he emphasized that "usage has changed significantly, and our current plans were not designed for that." The Max plan, he noted, was created before the introduction of Claude Code and Claude Cowork and was initially intended for chat-only intensive use.

This incident occurs within a broader context where Anthropic has altered its billing for enterprise customers, moving to a model based on the number of tokens used, which is often more expensive than previous rate limits. If Claude Code were permanently removed from the Pro plan, new subscribers would be forced to turn to more costly solutions to continue using this coding tool. Additionally, costs associated with the new tokenizer used for Opus 4.7 are also increasing.

A Computing Capacity Shortage Affecting the Entire Industry

Behind these pricing adjustments lies a more concerning reality: the growing shortage of computing capacity affecting the entire artificial intelligence sector. According to the Wall Street Journal, the uptime of Anthropic's API was only 98.95% in the 90 days leading up to April 8, well below the 99.99% standard typically expected in the cloud industry. Some enterprise clients, like Retool founder David Hsu, have already migrated to OpenAI due to these reliability issues. Hsu told the WSJ that he preferred Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model but had to switch because "Anthropic goes down all the time."

Anthropic is not alone in facing these challenges. OpenAI has decided to shut down its Sora application partly to free up computing resources for its coding and enterprise products. GitHub Copilot has also adjusted its billing model and temporarily suspended new sign-ups for its Pro, Pro+, and Student plans. Hourly prices for GPUs in the spot market have risen by 48%, according to the Ornn Compute Price Index.

In this context, Anthropic's temporary adjustments to the Pro plan appear less like a simple pricing experiment and more like a sign of systematic resource rationing within consumption tiers.