Claude Code yanked from Pro
- Anthropic removed Claude Code from new Pro plan signups in what the company described as an A/B pricing test. - Observers noted the pricing page listed Claude Code for Pro on Monday but showed an explicit “X” by Tuesday. - The change means new subscribers may not get CLI/terminal access, while existing users’ access appears unchanged for now. ( )
Anthropic briefly made it look like new $20 Claude Pro subscribers would lose Claude Code, its terminal coding tool, before calling the change a limited test. (theregister.com) The shift showed up on Anthropic’s pricing pages between Monday, April 21, and Tuesday, April 22. The Register reported that Pro changed from “includes Claude Code” to an explicit “X” for that feature, even as other Anthropic pages still listed Pro access. (theregister.com, claude.com) Anthropic’s head of growth, Amol Avasare, said the company was “running a small test” on about 2 percent of new prosumer signups and that existing Pro and Max subscribers were not affected. Anthropic did not publish a matching newsroom post or pricing changelog on its site. (theregister.com, anthropic.com) Claude Code is not just a chat window for programmers. Anthropic describes it as a system that can read a codebase, edit files across a project, run tests, and use command-line tools such as GitHub’s command-line interface inside a terminal workflow. (anthropic.com) That distinction helps explain why developers reacted quickly. Anthropic has been pushing Claude Code as a core product for software work, saying on its product page that “the majority of code” at Anthropic is now written by Claude Code. (anthropic.com) The pricing question lands a week after Anthropic’s April 16 launch of Claude Opus 4.7, which highlighted coding gains and added background-running Claude Code tasks. In the same post, Anthropic said Opus 4.7 was available to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users. (anthropic.com, anthropic.com) Anthropic’s own pricing pages still show why the company may be testing the boundary. The current Pro page says Pro costs $20 a month and includes Claude Code, while the Max page markets higher-usage tiers at $100 and $200 a month. (claude.com, claude.com) Avasare said usage patterns have changed since Max launched a year ago, with Claude Code, Cowork, and long-running agents driving heavier engagement per subscriber. That points to a pricing problem facing AI companies that sell flat monthly plans for tools that can consume far more computing than ordinary chat. (theregister.com) For now, the practical answer is narrower than the panic suggested: Anthropic says current paying users keep access, and its public Pro page once again advertises Claude Code. The bigger unresolved question is whether Anthropic can keep bundling terminal-grade coding agents into a $20 plan as those tools get used more like full-time workers than chatbots. (theregister.com, claude.com)
