Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup backed by Amazon, on Wednesday introduced Claude’s Max plan, a new subscription tier for its chatbot that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Customers can pay $100 per month for five times the amount of usage as the company’s Pro plan, or $200 per month for 20 times the amount. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pro, which is comparable to Claude’s Max tier, costs a flat rate of $200 per month.
Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI research executives, launched Claude in March 2023. Like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has exploded in popularity as businesses rush to incorporate generative AI chatbots across sales, marketing and customer service functions.
Claude’s Max plan is a step above Anthropic’s free offering and the $20 per month usage tier and a step below the company’s business and enterprise options. Subscribers will get “priority access to new models and capabilities, creating an exclusive pipeline to test and implement innovative Claude solutions,” Anthropic said.
That includes access to Claude’s voice mode, which will be introduced soon, according to product lead Scott White.
Anthropic has been receiving requests for a usage tier like Max for at least a year, White said in an interview. He said a lot of demand was coming from people using Claude for “pragmatic professional usage,” such as coding, financial services, media and entertainment, and marketing.
The latest subscription tier is designed for power users, giving them first access to the company’s new technology.
“I’m excited for the people who really think of Claude as something that’s indispensable for them not being blocked anymore by these limits and getting to scale their usage of Claude to make sure that it’s solving as many problems for them as possible,” White said.
Last month, Anthropic closed its latest funding round at a $61.5 billion valuation. In December, annualized revenue hit $1 billion, up about tenfold from a year earlier, a source told CNBC at the time. Customers include startups as well as larger businesses like Zoom, Snowflake, Pfizer and Novo Nordisk.
