Anthropic Introduces Monthly Subscription Plan for AI Assistant

Anthropic has introduced a paid plan for its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant, Claude. 

The Claude Pro plan offers subscribers five times more usage of the AI assistant, which is available in only the United States and the United Kingdom, for a monthly fee of $20 in the U.S. and 18 pounds in the U.K., Anthropic said in a Thursday (Sept. 7) announcement on its website. 

“Since launching in July, users tell us they’ve chosen Claude.ai as their day-to-day AI assistant for its longer context windows, faster outputs, complex reasoning capabilities and more,” the company said in the announcement. “Many also shared that they would value more file uploads and conversations over longer periods.” 

Potential use cases of Claude Pro and the higher usage it offers include summarizing research papers, querying contracts and iterating coding projects, according to the announcement. 

Compared to the free tier, the new Claude Pro paid plan also offers the ability to send more messages, priority access to the AI assistant during periods of high traffic, and early access to new features, the announcement said. 

Anthropic says its AI bot is designed to be “helpful, harmless and honest.” The latest version, Claude 2, was launched in July and is the firm’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and Alphabet’s Bard product. 

The company itself is a public benefit corporation that was founded in 2021 by executives at OpenAI who split off to form their own AI company due to concerns that OpenAI was growing too commercial. 

In one recent move, Anthropic teamed up with Korea’s SK Telecom (SKT) in August to build a large language model (LLM) for the telecom sector. The partnership will also see SKT invest $100 million into Anthropic. 

Three months earlier, in May, Anthropic raised $450 million in a Series C round to develop its AI assistant. The round was led by Spark Capital with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures, Zoom Ventures and Google, which had invested $300 million in the company earlier this year. 

“The funding will support our continued work developing helpful, harmless and honest AI systems — including Claude, an AI assistant that can perform a wide variety of conversational and text processing tasks,” Anthropic said at the time.