Anthropic, the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI employees, has introduced its inaugural premium subscription plan for its AI-powered chatbot, Claude 2. The new offering, called Claude Pro, is priced at $20 per month in the U.S. or £18 per month in the U.K. Subscribers to Claude Pro will receive several benefits, including “5x more usage” than the free Claude 2 tier, increased messaging capabilities, priority access during peak times, and early access to new features.
Claude Pro’s pricing aligns with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, a paid plan for ChatGPT, a competitor to Claude 2. Anthropic stated that users have selected Claude as their primary AI assistant for its extended context capabilities, faster responses, complex reasoning abilities, and more. With Claude Pro, subscribers will gain five times more usage of Anthropic’s latest model.
Claude Pro users can anticipate sending a minimum of 100 messages to Claude 2 every eight hours, following the message limit reset. This exceeds the 50-message-per-three-hour limit of ChatGPT Plus. The message limits are implemented to manage the capacity constraints of hosting highly capable AI chatbots like Claude 2, which require significant computational resources to operate, particularly when dealing with large attachments and extended conversations.
Anthropic’s broader goal is to develop a “next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching” that can power virtual assistants capable of handling various tasks like answering emails, conducting research, and generating content. To pursue this ambition, the company has raised $1.45 billion but estimates it will require $5 billion over the next two years, primarily for compute capacity.
While Anthropic claims to have “thousands” of customers and partners, including Quora, it faces competition from Cohere, AI21 Labs, and OpenAI, which expects to generate $1 billion in revenue next year from its AI tools used by millions of developers.
