Anthropic expects to make $18 billion this year. The analysis estimates that they have met their targets ahead of schedule. But apparently they are not satisfied。

This morning, a developer named George Pu said on X: "Anthropic just removed Claude Code from the Pro package. Pro users who want to use this feature must now upgrade to the Max package at a minimum monthly cost of $100

This means that the price has increased fivefold in order to maintain the same privileges. No blog, no mail, no changelog. Anthropic had a very quiet page update trying to raise prices。

This tweet spreads rapidly. The price sheet screenshot began to circulate in Reddit, Hacker News and the developers. The community has repeatedly confirmed to the screen that the row of Claude Code, under the Pro column, is a fork mark, and that only Max 5x ($100/month) and Max 20x ($200/month) retain the hook. Anthropic's supporting document, which used to be "Using Claude Code with your Pro or Max Plan," is now "Using Claude Code with your Max Plan"。

The community is naturally very dissatisfied and opinion pressure has accumulated to a certain extent, and Amol Avasare, the growth director of Anthropic, has had to respond in X. According to him, this is only a small test for about 2 per cent of newly registered Pro users, and the existing Pro and Max subscribers are not affected。

Then he made a longer explanation in the same line to the effect that when Max was launched a year ago, he didn't even include Claude Code, and Cowork didn't exist, and long-duration agents were not a routine. Max was originally designed to be a heavy chat user, that's all。

However, since the release of Opus 4, Claude Code's usage has grown explosively. It's a daily tool for developers. "There has been a significant increase in the usage per subscriber, and our current pricing formula is not designed in this way."

He concluded by assuring that if the final plan affects the existing subscriber, sufficient notice would be given that "the message will come from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit"。

Over the past few months, we've been working hard

Avasare's explanation sounds reasonable, but in combination, it points to a more fundamental question: Anthropic may be under severe arithmetical pressure。

Each of Claude Code's coding sessions consumes far more amounts of token than normal conversations, sometimes with an order of magnitude. The marginal cost of the 20/month price became out of control when Opus 4 came, when agents started running for hours, when Cowork pulled more people into a serious use。

In business logic, this is not a small problem with "user use" but rather a fundamental error in pricing models following rapid evolution of product capabilities. Max was designed for heavy chats, and now Max is going to carry an ongoing programming agent. The cost of calculating two things is completely different。

Avasare uses the word "engagement per subscriber is way up". Translation into the commercial language is that the same money, the users now consume much more resources。

It's not the first time. Longen the timeline, Anthropic. There's been a lot of "tightening" in these months。

In August 2025, Anthropic announced a weekly ceiling for Pro and Max users, effective 28 August. The official reason is that some users circumvent restrictions by sharing and reselling accounts in violation of usage terms. The statement states that "it is expected to affect less than 5% of subscribers". The weekly limit is the first time a hard weekly ceiling has been set for high-paid users。

That same year, between the end of August and the beginning of September, things became more complicated. A large number of developers on Reddit and X reported a cliff drop in the quality of Claude 's code generation, and the model began to ignore its own plans, randomly create obscurities, and Claude Code 's task execution became unreliable. Anthropic finally admitted that this was the technology bug that emerged from the escalation of the reasoning post, which resulted in Claude Opus 4.1 continuing decomposition within approximately 56.5 hours and the issuance of an official reprocessing report。

this bug incident quickly collides with a larger controversy。

In early March 2026, Stella Laurenzo, a senior director of AMD, published a detailed analysis on GitHub, based on 6852 Claude Code sessions, 17871 thinking blocks and over 230,000 tools, and concluded that:

Claude Code's retarded. This analysis has generated strong resonance in the development community。

In a subsequent response, Claude Code Officer Boris Cherny denied the core conclusion of the "devious model", explaining that Opus 4.6 switched to the "self-adaptation thinking" model on February 9, and that the default effort level was changed to medium on March 3, which the official view was "best balance between intelligence, delay and cost". But he also admits that about 7% of the users will thus reach the ceiling of the session that they would not have previously touched, and that this adjustment is mainly for Pro users, Team and Enterprise at peak times。

From 13 to 27 March 2026, Anthropic launched a "multiple use of non-peak time" promotion: working afternoons from 2 p.m. to 8 a.m. the next morning (United States Eastern time), and throughout the weekend, the maximum amount automatically doubled to cover all Free, Pro, Max, Team packages。

It appears to be a welfare activity. However, in the context of the situation, the doubling was placed in non-peak time because the peak time itself was in a state of arithmetical tension. Double the amount allocated to spare capacity, which does not affect congestion time, while also creating a transformational power to upgrade to higher packages。

Then on April 4th, Anthropic announced that it was forbidden to run the third-party anent framework through the use of the Pro and Max subscriptions. If a user wishes to continue calling Claude through an external framework such as OpenClaw, an additional sub-payment is required。

And this time Claude Code disappeared from the Pro pricing page。

A, IT'S DEFINITELY NOT THE LAST TIME

Back to Avasare's tweet. He says "Claude Code disappears from the Pro pricing page and is a small test for about 2% of newly registered Pro users," but this statement raises a lot of questions in the community。

The most direct question comes from the developer Simon Willison: "Everyone I know sees a new pricing page, and Internet Archive has a screenshot. If it really only affects 2% of users, why is the entire open pricing grid changed? Why do you support the synchronization of documents

More interestingly, when journalists were asking Avasare why priced pages and supported full-scale document changes, only 2 per cent of users were tested to explain this coverage at all. Anthropic’s corporate spokesman also failed to answer this query。

Another contradiction was noted: Claude Cowork was not removed from the Pro package, but from a product function point of view, Cowork was essentially Claude Code, a brand name. In the words of one developer, "Cowork is Claude Code in less scary clothes."。

The thing is that after hours of fermenting public opinion, Anthropic quietly restored the website and supporting documents. No description, no bulletin. Just like the change itself, it is done quietly。

If we look at these moves together, we'll find that Anthropic is now the heart of the horse, and everyone knows:

Anthropic is testing the boundaries with higher algorithms from subscribers step by step in a exploratory way. The doubling of weekends is to steer demand to idleness; the default downward revision of effort level is to save energy at peak times; the prohibition of third-party angent frameworks is to close a gap in the arbitrage of the amount; and Claude Code disappears from the Pro page, which is the bottom line of the user response to the more aggressive heavy pricing scheme。

Amol himself admitted: "Our current program is not designed in this way." This is a rare confession. It shows that Anthropic has realized to some extent that the current pricing structure cannot sustain the calculus consumption of Claude Code。

What happens next, we don't know。

But perhaps, as Ed Zitron wrote, "I don't think this is the last time that Anthropic does this."