Anthropic has been caught in controversy over its pricing policy for its artificial intelligence (AI) services. A notice that extra charges could be added for using high-performance models appeared, prompting user complaints, but the company said it was a simple error.
According to the information and communications technology (ICT) industry on the 3rd, Anthropic displayed the message on its Claude information page that "to use the Opus model on Claude Pro, Pro plan users must enable and purchase additional usage."
In response, developer communities and others raised concerns that Opus might only be available if users paid additional credits on top of the base subscription fee. Anthropic later said on Reddit that the wording was a labeling error that occurred during a documentation update.
Anthropic said, "That notice was old text written before the Opus model was officially included in the Pro plan," adding, "It was mistakenly left in place and not deleted, and there has been no actual policy change." The wording has now been corrected.
Still, user anxiety continues. As it became known that Anthropic conducted a test at the end of last month removing the developer-focused AI agent "Claude Code" from the Claude Pro plan, there is speculation that a plan overhaul could be coming.
Earlier, Anthropic removed Claude Code from the list of features for the Pro plan, which costs $20 a month, and said users would need to choose the Max plan, which costs at least $100 a month, to use Claude Code. At the time, Anthropic also said it was a test for some new users.
Launched last year, Claude Code surpassed an annualized revenue of $2.5 billion (about 3.7 trillion won) as of February this year, showing steep growth. The industry says the background to Anthropic running such plan tests is the massive infrastructure expense.
Claude Code, a developer-focused coding AI agent, is known to consume far more tokens than typical large language models (LLMs). According to Anthropic, the average daily infrastructure expense per highly active Claude Code user is $13. Converted to a monthly basis, that reaches the hundreds of dollars, leading to claims that the $20-per-month plan alone cannot cover the expense.