Anthropic manager hints that Pro and Max plans are outgrown by today's Claude workloads

The incident highlights an industry-wide shortage of compute. Providers such as OpenAI and GitHub are also currently restricting services or pausing new signups to conserve capacity.

Anthropic briefly removed Claude Code from its Pro subscription for new customers and reversed the change after public pushback. Head of Growth Amol Avasare signaled that the current subscription plans fundamentally no longer match how people are using Claude.

According to Ed Zitron, who documented the process on Where's Your Ed At, Claude Code temporarily disappeared from the pricing tables on Anthropic's website. On both mobile and desktop, the Pro tier showed an X next to Claude Code, while the Max 5x and Max 20x plans retained access. At the same time, the support documentation was updated: an archived version from April 10 still carried the headline "Using Claude Code with your Pro or Max plan," while the updated version read only "Using Claude Code with your Max plan." Existing Pro users reported that they were still able to access Claude Code via the command-line interface and the web app.

After the change was raised on X, Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic, said it was a "small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups" and that "Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren't affected." Zitron points out that this explanation does not match the observed changes: both the public pricing page and the general support documentation were altered so that every visitor saw Pro listed without Claude Code access. Anthropic later reversed the changes, and Avasare apologized for the confusion.

More interesting than the test itself are Avasare's comments about what is coming. He acknowledged that Anthropic had "made small adjustments along the way (weekly caps, tighter limits at peak)," but that "usage has changed a lot and our current plans weren't built for this." The Max plan, he said, predated Claude Code and Claude Cowork and was "designed for heavy chat usage, that's it."

The episode fits a broader pattern. Anthropic has shifted enterprise customers to per-million-token billing, away from rate limits that were often significantly cheaper than actual usage. If Claude Code were permanently dropped from the Pro tier, new subscribers would have to switch to paying for API tokens or move to more expensive plans to keep using the coding tool. On top of that come the higher costs of the new tokenizer that Anthropic uses for Opus 4.7.

Behind the tests and the changes already rolled out lies the growing compute capacity crunch sweeping the entire AI industry. According to the Wall Street Journal, Anthropic's API uptime was just 98.95 percent in the 90 days leading up to April 8, far below the 99.99 percent standard common in the established cloud business. Some enterprise customers, such as Retool founder David Hsu, have already switched to OpenAI as a result. Hsu told the WSJ he actually prefers Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model but recently moved over because "Anthropic just goes down all the time."

Anthropic is not the only one under pressure. OpenAI is shutting down its Sora app in part to free up compute for coding and enterprise products. GitHub Copilot has changed its billing model and has for now paused new signups for its Pro, Pro+ and Student plans. Spot-market GPU hourly prices are up 48 percent, according to the Ornn Compute Price Index.

Against that backdrop, the brief cuts to Pro look less like a standalone pricing experiment and more like a preview of systematic rationing of agentic tools inside consumer tiers.