According to Ed Zitron, who documented the change on Where’s Your Ed At, Claude Code temporarily disappeared from Anthropic’s pricing tables for Pro subscribers. On both mobile and desktop, the Pro plan showed an X next to Claude Code, while the Max 5x and Max 20x plans continued to include access. At the same time, Anthropic also updated its support documentation: an archived version from April 10 was still titled “Using Claude Code with your Pro or Max plan,” while the revised version referred only to the Max plan. Existing Pro users, however, reported that they could still access Claude Code through both the command-line interface and the web app.
After the change was discussed on X, Avasare said it was only a small test affecting around 2 percent of new prosumer sign-ups. He added that existing Pro and Max subscribers were not affected. Zitron argued that this explanation did not fully match what users had seen, because both the public pricing page and the general support documentation appeared to show that all visitors were being presented with Pro as a plan without Claude Code access. Anthropic later reversed the changes, and Avasare apologized for the confusion.
Max plans were built for chat, not Claude Code
More revealing than the test itself were Avasare’s comments about what may happen next. He acknowledged that Anthropic has already made small adjustments over time, including weekly caps and tighter limits during peak hours, but said the current plans were not originally designed for this kind of usage. According to him, the Max plan was launched before Claude Code and Claude Cowork and was created mainly for heavy chat usage — and nothing more.
This fits into a broader pattern. Anthropic has already moved some Enterprise customers to a billing model based on per-million-token usage, instead of traditional rate limits, which are often far cheaper than actual consumption. If Claude Code were permanently removed from the Pro plan, new subscribers would likely have to either switch to API token billing for coding use cases or move to more expensive subscription tiers. That pressure may grow further because of the higher costs of Anthropic’s newer tokenizer, which is being used for Opus 4.7.
Why this matters beyond a pricing test
Behind these experiments — and behind several changes that have already been implemented — lies a much larger issue: the growing compute capacity crisis affecting the entire AI industry.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Anthropic’s API availability over the 90 days leading up to April 8 was only 98.95 percent, far below the 99.99 percent reliability standard usually expected from major cloud services. Some enterprise customers have already reacted. For example, Retool founder David Hsu reportedly moved to OpenAI.
Anthropic is not alone. OpenAI is shutting down its Sora app in order to redirect compute resources toward coding and enterprise products. GitHub Copilot has also changed its billing model and temporarily paused new sign-ups for Pro, Pro+, and Student plans. Meanwhile, according to the Ornn Compute Price Index, spot-market GPU hourly prices have climbed by 48 percent.
Against this backdrop, the brief restriction on Claude Code access for Pro users looks less like a simple pricing experiment and more like an early sign of something bigger: systematic rationing of agentic AI tools in consumer-tier plans.
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