A tweet claiming that Anthropic was no longer offering Claude Code access to Pro subscribers paying $20 per month made the rounds on social media this week. This was seen as an indication that the company would need to take drastic measures to maintain service for customers amidst an ongoing compute shortage. Anthropic has not said how many Claude Code users it has currently, or how many of those users are Pro or Max subscribers.
As it turns out, the situation was overstated. Anthropic’s head of growth, Amol Avasare, responded directly to the post, saying that “we’re running a small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups. Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren’t affected.” In AB testing, this is called a “holdback test,” in which the value of a feature is measured by excluding a small subset of users from accessing it. Nevertheless, many questioned the wisdom of running a test like this on a tool as widely used as Claude, and competitors were quick to pile on. OpenAI directly implied it was a violation of customer trust, and Sam Altman mockingly replied “ok boomer” to Amol’s post.
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