On 9 April 2025, Anthropic announced its new premium subscription tier for its Claude AI assistant, named Max, positioning it as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s $200 ChatGPT Pro service. The Max subscription is available in two pricing tiers: $100 per month for five times the usage limit of Anthropic’s existing $20-per-month Pro plan, or $200 per month for twenty times the limit. Subscribers gain priority access to Anthropic’s latest AI models and features, including the forthcoming Claude voice mode, which, according to Chief Product Officer Scott White, will be introduced in the near future.
The launch of the Max tier reflects a broader trend among companies developing frontier AI models to seek new revenue streams, as the costs of advancing artificial intelligence remain exceptionally high. Anthropic has not ruled out the possibility of introducing even more expensive subscription tiers in the future. Notably, unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro, which offers unlimited usage, Anthropic does not yet provide an unlimited usage plan. In December, Anthropic achieved an annual revenue run rate of $1 billion, a tenfold increase from the previous year, and closed its latest funding round with a $61.5 billion valuation.
The Max tier is specifically tailored for professional users who rely heavily on Claude in their daily work across fields such as coding, financial services, media and entertainment, and marketing. Anthropic also expands its revenue streams through Claude for Education, targeting university clients with specialised capabilities and benefits for higher education institutions. Anthropic’s new Claude 3.7 Sonnet AI model, the company’s first “reasoning model” – which uses greater computational power to provide more reliable answers to certain questions compared to traditional models – has driven significant demand for its products.
Sources:
1.
Michael Nuñez
2.
Maxwell Zeff
3.
Hayden Field
